WAS CHRIST REALLY 
BORN OF A VIRGIN? 


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OF A VIRGIN: 


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Was Christ Really Been 
of a Virgin? 


An Answer for Laymen 


By T. H.’Yardley, M.A. 


Foreword by 


The Rt. Rev. Charles Fiske, D.D. 
Bishop of Central New York 


Morehouse Publishing Company 
Milwaukee, Wis. 


A. R. Mowbray & Co. 


London 


COPYRIGHT BY 
MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
1926 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
FoREWoRD. The Bishop of Central New 
SOT) SULT AAs an) A OL PIR OE ne ea teat aE 
PU HORSG ROE i het dae panier. (a, Gata ROR LE 
I. Two Books oF AUTHORITY. . I 
LE WHE UDIRTH(STORIESH AE altho ate arto 
BERCUVETRAGLES or ci he nt mit iay Fah NG HEME Uae 
PY PLE OLE NCE rai kom yh al Se 
W WY HAT THE) CRITICS OAY ae hc OS 
VI. A SUBORDINATE TRUTH . .. . 83 
VII. Wuat Does THE VIRGIN BIRTH 
INET AN Fiauitiiely hair Rte N AR siecle ath OUR 


Ree eRE ED AND TP AITEH uch scioosy beeen DES 


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FOREWORD 


By THE BisHop OF CENTRAL NEw YORK 


THE MAss of Christian teachers who are 
denying the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, or 
minimizing its importance, seem to forget that 
according to the faith which has been held by 
the Church from the beginning, the birth of 
our Lord was miraculous whether He was Vir- 
gin-born or not. It seems to me that the present 
denials are really the result of indefinite 
thought as to the Person of Christ. Teachers 
who think they are teaching the Incarnation are 
really ‘‘Adoptionists”. They have ‘exalted 
Christ into the realm of the divine’, instead of 
proclaiming a Divine Saviour who came down 
to assume our humanity. 

If the Church’s faith is true, and the com- 
ing of Christ was an entrance into human life 
of an eternally pre-existing Personality, we 
have here something so without equal or like- 
ness in the annals of men, that the traditional 
account of the manner of His entrance seems 
reasonable and natural. This is not to say that 


vill Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


the Virgin Birth establishes the Incarnation, 
or that we believe in the Deity of Christ be- 
cause of the miraculous story of His birth. 
Rather, it means that because, through other 
experiences—through the wonder of His 
words and works, the sinlessness of His life, 
the perfection of His character, the depth of 
His love, the tremendous nature of His claims, 
His self-consciousness of Divinity—because 
through all this we have come to full faith in 
Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, we ap- 
proach the story of His birth in such a spirit 
as to find it singularly in keeping with the 
Great Event of the advent of the Son into hu- 
man life. Why hesitate at the lesser miracle, if 
we have accepted the greater miracle of the 
Incarnation itself? While belief in the Incar- 
nation is not based upon belief in the Virgin 
Birth, the two are so congruous that a real In- 
carnation can hardly be thought of as taking 
place in any other manner. 

We cannot imagine the fact being made 
known to the apostles until after their faith 
was established, any more than we can imagine 
our Lord abruptly announcing to them His 
Godhead. It was of the very essence of His 
method that the apostles should come slowly to 
their understanding of Him. He never would 


Foreword 1X 


tell them plainly who He was. They had to 
learn for themselves. Had the knowledge been 
thrust upon them, instead of gradually “‘slid- 
ing into their minds,” the naturalness of their 
life with Him would have been lost and one 
purpose of the Incarnation defeated, in that 
they could not have had close fellowship with 
Him. It was not until after His resurrection 
that the full meaning of His life broke upon 
them. He was declared to be the Son of God 
with power by His victory over death. 

Reading the story of Christ’s life in this way, 
it is wonderfully simple and natural. ‘The faith 
in which it issued is unlike anything men ever 
dreamed of before. And the story of its be- 
ginning is also beautiful in its simplicity, won- 
derfully and winsomely appealing in its sweet- 
ness and purity—utterly unlike any other so- 
called virgin birth myths. I am convinced that 
if once the whole meaning of the Great Life 
has been accepted, the story of its beginning 
will be found natural and any other birth un- 
thinkable. And I am convinced that no defini- 
tion of the faith except that which is expressed 
in the two great creeds can possibly explain the 
life itself. 

I am glad to write this by way of an intro- 
duction to an essay on the Virgin Birth which 


x Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


needs no apologetic preface. This brief essay 
can be read and understood by anyone who has 
given thought enough to the Christian faith 
to understand it at all. I hope the book may be 
put into the hands of laymen everywhere. It 
is wholly uncontroversial, free from charges of 
dishonesty and insincerity so frequently made 
against those who have not been able to accept 
the Gospel tradition. It is illuminating in its 
exposition of the essential connection between 
the fact of the Virgin Birth and faith in the 
Incarnation, and especially in its analysis of 
the striking congruity between the unique birth 
and the basic belief of Christians in the Deity 
of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is sympathetic of 
doubt and difficulty, patient of misunderstand- 
ing, yet the treatment has a warmth of faith 
and conviction that is most compelling. The 
treatment is scholarly and scrupulously fair, 
both in its investigation of the Gospel narra- 
tives and its consideration of their authenticity 
and in its separation of the central truth from 
all subsidiary questions. Best of all, the essay 
is profoundly reverent, as befits the discussion 
of a subject so intimate and delicate. 

It has been a marvel to me in reading the 
manuscript, to find that the whole argument 
could be condensed into such small space and 


Foreword x1 


yet be so readable and the treatment of the 
subject so “popular” and interesting. The little 
book meets a real need. I know no other treat- 
ise that quite fills its place. 

CHARLES FISKE 


Bishopstead, Utica, N. Y. 


AUTHOR’S NOTE 


ANYONE who has read at all on the subject 
of this book will realize that there is nothing 
new in what I have to say. Indeed, the doctrine 
of the Virgin Birth has been so thoroughly 
covered by scholars that it is doubtful whether 
there can be anything new to say unless in the 
future some happy find may bring to light 
through manuscript or inscription new knowl- 
edge of our sources. The only originality of 
treatment which is possible at present would 
seem to lie in the matter of emphasis. I have 
tried to bring out in this way just those 
thoughts which appeal especially to myself and 
which I therefore feel may appeal to others 
who, like myself, can lay no claim to deep schol- 
arship. After all, a technical vocabulary is not 
an essential to theological discussion. It would 
not be difficult, I suppose, to slip into the dic- 
tion of New Testament criticism, to speak with 
seeming familiarity of the “Pauline” or “Jo- 
hannine”’ stream of tradition, to surmise over 
the contents of the hypothetical (and some- 


Author’s Note X1il 


what Teutonic) ‘‘Q’’ Gospel, or to discuss the 
“Christology” of this or that school. But cui 
bono? My friends, the professional and busi- 
ness men generally and their wives, just want 
a plain tale. So far as one can reduce a fairly 
intricate subject to simple terms, I have tried 
to do so. 

But I owe a deep debt to many writers of 
real learning—to more than I should be able 
to name-—and, if I have borrowed their 
thoughts, as of course I have, I hereby tender 
them my gratitude. Perhaps to none do I owe 
quite so much as I do to Bishop Gore, whose 
writings have helped and inspired me for many 
years in the past and to whose lucid and rever- 
ent treatment of all that pertains to our 
Saviour’s religion I hope to turn with pleasure 
as well as with profit in the years to come. 

Above all, however, I am deeply grateful to 
my old friend and colleague Bishop Fiske, to 
whose kindly encouragement and only too fav- 
orable opinion I owe it that these brief sugges- 
tions on the tradition of the Virgin Birth have 
found their way to the printer. 





TWO BOOKS OF AUTHORITY 


IN THESE DAYS not a few people seem to be 
uncertain as to the truth of the virgin birth of 
Christ. With many, probably the great major- 
ity, the authority of the old traditional faith 
of Christendom means too much to permit 
them to doubt. But with others new factors are 
entering in to change their beliefs, or at least 
to make them question the validity of what 
their fathers held so implicitly. All the influ- 
ence of a modern intellectual theology, all the 
present day reaction against the reality of mi- 
raculous happenings, all the vague but wide- 
spread distrust of the historical accuracy of 
the Bible, and, finally, all the popular setting 
forth of Jesus the man, rather than Jesus Christ 
the incarnate Son of God, has had a most un- 
settling effect upon the faith of many sincere 
Christians, and especially, it would seem, upon 
their belief in the virgin birth of Christ. If, 
as is the case, some prominent and able min- 
isters of the Gospel, in various churches, have 
openly denied a belief in the old Christmas 


2 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


story of Bethlehem, is it any wonder that lay- 
men, untrained in clear theological thinking, 
should in some cases find a certain kind of re- 
lief by dropping from their thoughts a tradi- 
tion which seems to do violence to the most 
fundamental principles of physical life? 
Under these circumstances it would be well 
for us all to understand very clearly the ele- 
mentary reasons for still holding fast to a be- 
lief which seems to create so much difficulty. 
The churches prevailingly remain officially loy- 
al to the truth expressed in the Apostles’ 
Creed: “I believe in. . . .Jesus Christ. . . .Con- 
ceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin 
Mary’’; and yet their ministers and lay people 
are today challenging that truth in sufficient 
numbers to make it incumbent upon those who 
still hold faithfully to it to give a full, clear, 
and satisfactory answer to such questions as, 
Why do you believe in such an impossible 
thing? or, Why can I not accept Christ Him- 
self without cumbering my belief with unnec- 
essary and childish legends of the past? Un- 
doubtedly the whole great Christmas story 
from the annunciation to the flight into Egypt 
—the visions of St. Joseph and St. Mary, the 
wonderful birth in the little town of Bethle- 
hem, the angelic message to the shepherds, the 


Two Books of Authority 3 


visit and adoration of the Magi, the escape 
from Herod—all of this is inexpressibly dear 
to multitudes of Christian hearts, and has 
served as the inspiration of many of the great- 
est works of poetry, music, and art for centu- 
ries past. But the beauty and tenderness of the | 
story must not blind us to the necessity of es- 
tablishing firmly its right to a place among the 
great fundamental truths of our religion. If the 
churches are to maintain their belief in the 
virgin birth of Christ they must establish that 
belief on reasonable grounds, and the laity 
must understand the vital connection which 
subsists between the manner of the birth of 
the Saviour and His place as the Divine Re- 
deemer of mankind. 

It is the purpose of this little book to place 
the whole matter before the laity in brief form 
and in as simple and untechnical language as 
possible, so that those who have never made a 
study of New Testament criticism may easily 
follow it. A complete and scholarly treatment 
of the subject will not be attempted. Even if 
I were equipped—as I am not—to enter the 
lists of critical controversy, a full and search- 
ing examination of the doctrine of the Virgin 
Birth would be superfluous, since some of the 
ablest scholars of modern times have brilliant- 


4 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


ly defended that doctrine against the attacks of 
destructive critics. But if a reading of this 
short presentation of the subject should result 
in a further and detailed study of the various 
questions involved, then my labor will not have 
been in vain. For those who may desire to go 
more deeply into historical and critical subjects 
connected with the biblical accounts of our 
Lord’s birth, a list of a few books bearing on 
these matters will be given at the close of this 
chapter. 

It must, however, be clearly understood that 
scholarship cannot and does not attempt to do 
anything more than establish a strong presump- 
tion in favor of the reliability of the New 
Testament records. The life of our Lord, His 
words and deeds, and, above all, His character 
and personality, are of such a kind as to de- 
mand for their full comprehension a humble 
and reverent faith. We may say without hesi- 
tation that the virgin birth of Christ is a per- 
fectly meaningless event apart from an unre- 
served acceptance of the Virgin’s Son as God 
incarnate. There are those who profess to ac- 
cept the miracle as a fact, but yet maintain that 
it is not related to the Divine plan of redemp- 
tion. These are standing on very insecure 
ground. Their belief in the virgin birth must 


Two Books of Authority 5 


rest solely upon the historical truth of the 
records. If those records are open to question 
on any grounds, then they have nothing else 
whatever to which they can appeal to vindicate 
their belief. We must have not only a reason- 
ably sure historical basis for our belief in gen- 
eral, but also such a clear perception of the 
significance for us and for all men of the di- 
vine personality of the Son of Mary that our 
faith will reach out and grasp the meaning of 
things which would otherwise be incomprehen- 
sible. In other words, let us always remember 
that in the matter of Christian believing intel- 
lectual understanding is of far less importance 
than the exercise of a reasonable faith. With- 
out the latter we can get nowhere at all. We 
must realize that there are indeed things which 
are hidden from the wise and prudent but 
which are revealed unto babes. I take it for 
granted that those who are sufficiently inter- 
ested in the controversy over the virgin birth 
of Christ to read a simple defence of that doc- 
trine will approach the subject from the stand- 
point of convinced believers in the divine per- 
sonality of Christ. Otherwise, what I have to 
say can have no meaning at all for them. 
Assuming, therefore, the existence of this 
underlying faith, let us go on to an inquiry into 


6 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


the credentials of our documents, and ask what 
are the dates, authorship, and general trust- 
worthiness of the two records from which our 
belief in the virgin birth originally comes. 
These are questions over which New Testa- 
ment criticism has busied itself for more than 
an hundred years. We need not follow the 
history of that criticism, but we shall do well © 
to note that although there are wide diver- 
gencies of opinion among modern students of 
the Bible yet the general trend of judgment 
during the last quarter of a century has been 
away from the older destructive position and in 
the direction of the traditional view of the 
origins of the New Testament books. This is 
a great gain for the churches. The criticism of 
fifty or seventy-five years ago made serious in- 
roads into the faith of Christendom, and the 
effects of the older attacks are probably being 
felt more today than ever before. The modern- 
ism of our own times is the logical result of 
the work of German and other biblical scholars 
who have long been dead, but many of whose 
radical teachings are still current. Critics often 
seem to feel that it is necessary to approach 
the subject of the Bible without one scintilla 
of that faith which, as we must maintain, is 
absolutely essential to a real comprehension of 


Two Books of Authority 7 


the Bible’s message. Possibly it is better so. 
Possibly it is better to subject the Gospels to a 
kind of post-mortem dissection. ‘The resuscita- 
tion, under the influence of good scholarship 
and faith combined, becomes only the more 
manifest and convincing. Certainly no set of 
writings has ever been submitted to such a 
thorough and minute examination as have the 
books of the New Testament; and certainly the 
vindication which those books have received in 
recent years at the hands of not a few scholars 
_ of the first rank ought to be of the greatest en- 
couragement to all of us who want to feel that 
we can really trust the Gospels’ portraiture of 
the Saviour of the world. Scholarship is telling 
us, cautiously, but more clearly as the years go 
on, that those books of ancient times are au- 
thentic—just what they purport to be. But 
faith can help us to see that the only interpre- 
tation of their contents which is at once reason- 
able and satisfying is the old interpretation of 
the Church which gave us the books, namely, 
that God himself in His divine love and pity 
came into our life to share our experience and 
to die our death. 

The two documents with which we are chief- 
ly concerned are the Gospel according to St. 


Matthew and the Gospel of St. Luke. 


8 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


With regard to the former, we shall be on 
safe ground if we take it as a compilation 
made by some unknown writer, probably a 
Jewish Christian, about the year 80; that it is 
based on the older Gospel of St. Mark, or pref- 
erably, upon some earlier lost document which it- 
self was the source of St. Mark; and that it has 
incorporated into it the ‘“Words of Christ” as 
traditionally coming from St. Matthew the 
Apostle. We may confidently take it as a thor- 
oughly trustworthy source of knowledge about 
our Lord, resting ultimately upon the profound 
conviction of the “‘eye-witnesses of the Word”. 
The character and personality of our Lord 
manifestly made a spiritual impression upon 
His disciples so deep and permanent that, as 
one of them described it, they could not but 
speak the things which they had seen and 
heard. Life meant just one thing for them: 
bearing witness to the Christ whom they had 
known. Their burning conviction of the truth 
quickly found expression in the first tradition 
of Christianity—whether oral or in writings— 
and thus became the sure foundation of all our 
knowledge of the life of Christ. (The reader 
should be warned not to confuse the word tra- 
dition with myth or legend. As used in con- 
nection with the sources of our knowledge of 


Two Books of Authority 9 


Christ, tradition denotes the body of truth 
which was transmitted from the original eye- 
witness to groups of believers, whether by 
word of mouth or in written form.) The earli- 
est tradition of the Gospel formed much of the 
substance of the ‘“‘preaching’’ of the Apostles, 
which is so often referred to by St. Paul and 
other writers. I believe that the prevailing 
opinion of scholars today is that this tradition 
found expression in written forms at a very 
early date indeed. Certainly we know from St. 
Luke that before he wrote his Gospel many had 
taken in hand the writing down of all that 
Jesus had done and said. Of those primitive 
written forms of the tradition all have been ir- 
revocably lost, but the probability would seem 
to be that their contents have been completely 
preserved in the Gospels of the New Testament 
and that we of today have been deprived of 
nothing which is essential to the portraiture of 
the Saviour. The Gospel according to St. Mat- 
thew may therefore be regarded as representing 
the ultimate form which a large part of the 
earliest tradition tcok at the hands of some un- 
known Jewish Christian who was deeply in- 
terested in the fulfilment of Hebrew prophecy 
in the person of our Lord. We may also say 
that in this Gospel are to be found the “‘logia” 


10 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


or “words of Christ’ as traditionally coming 
from the Apostle St. Matthew—whence the 
title of the book—and that it was compiled 
about half a century after the crucifixion, at a 
date when there were still some left of the 
original disciples of our Lord. The year 80 
may, however, be too late a date for its com- 
position. Professor Harnack in his Date of the 
Acts and Synoptic Gospels puts St. Matthew in 
‘close proximity” to the destruction of Jeru- 
salem, which occurred in 70, and does not ex- 
clude an even earlier date. I do not feel, how- 
ever, that the matter of a decade one way or 
the other makes any difference in its trustworthi- 
ness. This Gospel comes to us today with all 
the impressive authority of a record supported 
by the unimpeachable testimony of the first 
Christian witnesses, and gives us much of the 
actual teaching of our Lord in a form as nearly 
approximating his own words as is humanly 
possible. It needs only to be added that the first 
two chapters which narrate the birth of Jesus 
are unquestionably a part of the book as it 
originally appeared. Not only is there no evi- 
dence at all for supposing that they are a later 
addition, but there is every reason for suppos- 
ing them to be the very oldest portion of the 
entire New Testament. 


Two Books of Authority II 


As regards the second book which contains 
an account of our Saviour’s virgin birth, we 
may say without the slightest hesitation that 
it is the work of the man whose name it bears, 
St. Luke, the beloved physician, the companion 
and fellow traveler of St. Paul. Some critics 
still place the composition of this book as late 
as the year 80, or even later, but we shall be 
on very safe ground if we regard it as com- 
pleted before the death of St. Paul, which took 
place about the year 67. St. Luke was a gentile 
and not one of the original circle of eye-wit- 
nesses, but he has proved himself to be an his- 
torian of the first rank, and the authority of 
his work is beyond all question. 

So important in this brief treatment of the 
documents relating the birth of Christ are the 
standing and reliability of St. Luke as a care- 
ful and painstaking historian, that it would be 
well to notice one instance, closely related to 
our subject, in which the accuracy of St. Luke 
has been completely vindicated in fairly re- 
cent years. I refer to his statements in the three 
opening verses of the second chapter of his 
Gospel—those verses which tell of a universal 
census taken under Augustus when Cyrenius 
was governor of Syria. Not so many years ago 
each one of St. Luke’s assertions in these verses 


12. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


was dismissed by the critics as a mere fabri- 
cation, both false and clumsy. There could 
never have been an imperial census in Palestine 
at that time, for it was not a Roman province; 
Cyrenius was not governor of Syria until ten 
years later; and, finally, even if there had been 
a census it would not have been necessary for 
Joseph to leave his home in Nazareth to be en- 
rolled, much less his wife. The whole story, 
according to the critics and according to some 
historians also, was inserted by St. Luke in 
order to bring the birth of the Christ into the 
town of Bethlehem and make it agree with an- 
cient Hebrew prophecy. So St. Luke stood dis- 
credited, and his narrative, both in the Gospel 
and the Acts, was unreliable as history. With- 
out going into the matter too deeply, we may 
now say that the tables have been completely 
turned and each statement of the Evangelist 
has been vindicated. Palestine was not, it is 
true, a Roman province at that time, but it was 
a subject kingdom, and the will of the Emperor 
in such a matter as a census was dominant. 
Cyrenius was twice Governor of Syria—both 
at the time we are considering, and later. And 
finally, it has now been proved that periodical 
enrollments of the provinces and subject king- 
doms were the settled policy of the Empire be- 


Two Books of Authority 13 


fore our Saviour’s birth and for a long time 
afterward, and these enrollments often involved 
the return of whole households to their na- 
tive towns or districts. The object of this pol- 
icy seems to have been to prevent the scattering 
of native populations. A full treatment of this 
whole matter will be found in Sir William 
Ramsay’s fascinating book, The Bearing of Re- 
cent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the 
New Testament. St. Luke is an historian who, 
as he tells us in his prologue, looked carefully 
and conscientiously into his sources of informa- 
tion, and who wrote in order that his readers 
might know the certainty of those things in 
which they had been instructed. Like the Gos- 
pel according to St. Matthew, his work is 
based upon the oldest Gospel, St. Mark, or, 
better, upon the supposed source of St. Mark; 
but it bears every indication of most careful re- 
vision. Also, as in the case of St. Matthew, 
the first two chapters which relate the birth of 
Christ, are an integral part of the Gospel as 
it first appeared, and are to be dated far back 
in the earliest years of the life of the Church. 
There is not one particle of evidence, either 
in the narrative itself or from outside sources, 
for supposing them to have been a later addi- 
tion. 


14, Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


So much, in very brief, we may say for the 
documentary standing of the two books which 
contain the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. 
That they are inspired writings, we most con- 
fidently believe and assert. That inspiration in- 
volves any suggestion of verbal infallibility is 
not for a moment to be considered in these days. 
Of course there are many inaccuracies and min- 
or contradictions in the New Testament rec- 
ords, as is perfectly obvious. But such inaccu- 
racies are very superficial; they do not in the 
least affect the essential truth of what was 
written; and their presence in the pages of the 
Gospels simply brings into clearer light the 
manifest good faith and unconscious integrity 
of the writers. We do contend, however, that 
the delineation of the character and personality 
of our Lord as given in the New Testament 
cannot possibly be the work of human imagina- 
tion, but is the result of an inexpressibly pro- 
found conviction of truth implanted in the 
hearts and souls of the disciples by their daily 
contact with Jesus of Nazareth. Their con- 
viction of the sinless character and superhuman 
personality of our Lord is the thing which lies 
closest of all to the heart of our religion. Fi- 
nally and completely confirmed by the resurrec- 
tion of Christ, and vitalized by the experience 


Two Books of Authority ie 


of Pentecost, this conviction of the eye-witnesses 
becomes for us of this day, as it became for 
the Christians of the first century, the surest 
warrant we can have for the truth of the Gos- 
pel. It is a flame which communicates itself with — 
undiminished brilliancy and potency whereso- 
ever it touches human life—even over long 
centuries of time unto our own day. Skeptics 
can devise, and have devised, plausible expla- 
nations of nearly everything in the New Testa- 
ment—denying the reality of the miraculous, 
picking to shreds the words of our Lord, par- 
ing away all the historical basis of the religion 
in which we believe, making Christ Himself but 
a myth—but, in the end, they are still con- 
fronted by this manifest and really awful con- 
viction of truth in the minds and hearts of the 
writers of the New Testament—a conviction 
which is articulate on every page and which 
was so burned into the hearts of simple and ob- 
scure men as to transform them into pioneers 
of the most far-reaching and permanently for- 
cible movement in the history of mankind. If 
we fail to catch something of this pristine con- 
viction ourselves, then we have only the 
shadow, not the substance, of the truth, and 
we can depend upon nothing more certain than 
a kind of subjective idealized Christ. But if we 


16 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


perceive and feel the reality of this conviction 
back of all that is written in the New Testa- 
ment—if, by faith, we open our hearts to the 
intense power of the words of the writers— 
then we have a sure hold on truth; we have laid 
our foundations on a rock. 

In the Gospel according to St. Matthew and 
the Gospel of St. Luke, though we have no rea- 
son for supposing that the writer of either book 
ever saw or heard our Lord, yet we find the 
flame of that earliest conviction burning with 
undiminished heat. Whatever meaning we may 
attach to “‘inspiration’” in general, we cannot 
easily avoid the acknowledgment that those 
men wrote from an overmastering sense of re- 
ality and truth. We may therefore come to the 
stories which they give us of our Saviour’s birth 
with a well grounded confidence in the integrity 
and responsibility of the writers—a confidence 
which will strongly predispose us to look seri- 
ously upon their narratives as at least based 
upon good authority and given in good faith, 
and not to reject them offhand as mere idle 
myths, easily accepted in a credulous age of 
the world but unworthy of consideration by in- 
telligent and enlightened moderns. 


Two Books of Authority 17 


Among the various books devoted to a de- 
fense of the virgin birth I would especially 
recommend the following: 


A treatise in the volume called Dissertations 


on Subjects Connected with the Incarnation, by 
Bishop Gore. 


The Virgin Birth of Christ, by Dr. James 
Orr, Free Church College, Glasgow. 


The Virgin Birth of our Lord, by the Rev. 
Leonard Prestige, Oxford. 


The Virgin Birth of Jesus, by the Rev. G. 
H. Box, King’s College, London. 


This last, a publication of very recent years, 
can hardly be excelled in its fair and reasonable 
presentment of the critical questions involved, 
or in its reverent sympathy with the theologi- 
cal bearing of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. 

In Dr. Orr’s valuable work will be found an 
appendix containing excerpts from a number 
of important papers by some of the ablest 
modern scholars, showing how strong is the tes- 
timony in behalf of the trustworthiness of the 
documents. 

A great many other books and articles upon 
our subject have been published during the last 
half century, but they are far too numerous to 


18 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


name. Among them, however, I would suggest 
as most valuable and helpful the chapters de- 
voted to the Virgin Birth in the writings of that 
revered and profound American scholar, the 


late Dr. Charles F. Briggs. 


Il 
THE BIRTH STORIES 


It 1s always of interest to ask concerning 
those who have made a name and position for 
themselves in the world, when and where were 
they born, and who were their parents? Now 
it is the simple fact that the answers to all such 
questions concerning Him whose position in hu- 
man life is that of unquestioned moral and 
spiritual supremacy are to be found in only two 
very brief passages of very ancient date. What- 
ever we know about the birth of our Lord Je- 
sus Christ comes from the opening chapters of 
those two Gospels which we have been consid- 
ering, St. Matthew and St. Luke. No one is 
competent to assert anything whatever concern- 
ing the Nativity which is not contained in those 
two passages. For example, many critics have 
maintained that Christ was born in Nazareth 
instead of in Bethlehem; but their contention 
not only contradicts the record but also is de- 


20 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


void of the slightest direct evidence. We all 
have the privilege of disbelief. We are under 
no compulsion to accept the Evangelists’ ac- 
counts of Christ’s birth as true. But, on the 
other hand, we must remember that we have 
no other source of information concerning that 
birth save those Evangelists. In any discussion 
of the virgin birth, therefore, this fact raises 
the two passages in which it is related to a 
position of first importance. 

It will be convenient and instructive to have 
before our eyes for reference and comparison 
at least that part of each passage which con- 
cerns our subject most closely. I will use the 
Revised Version of the New Testament for 
the sake of accuracy, and put the two accounts 
in parallel columns. 


ST. MATTHEW 1:18 to end 


Now the birth of Jesus 
Christ was on this wise: 
When his mother, Mary, 
had been betrothed to Jo- 
seph, before they came to- 
gether she was found with 
child of the Holy Ghost. And 
Joseph her husband, being a 
righteous man, and not will- 
ing to make her a publick ex- 
ample, was minded to put her 
away privily. But when he 
thought on these things, be- 
hold an angel of the Lord 


St. LUKE 1:26 to 39 


Now in the sixth month 
the angel Gabriel was sent 
from God to a city of Gali- 
lee named Nazareth, to a vir- 
gin betrothed to a man whose 
name was Joseph, of the 
house of David; and the vir- 
gin’s name was Mary. And 
he came in unto her and 
said, Hail thou that art 
highly favoured, the Lord is 
with thee. But she was great- 
ly troubled at the saying, and 
cast in her mind what man- 


The Birth Stories 21 


St. MATTHEW 1:18 to end 
(Continued) 


appeared unto him in a 
dream, saying, Joseph, thou 
son of David, fear not to 
take unto thee Mary thy 
wife: for that which is con- 
ceived in her is of the Holy 
Ghost. And she shall bring 
forth a son; and thou shalt 
call his name Jesus; for it is 
he that shall save his peo- 
ple from their sins. Now all 
this is come to pass, that it 
might be fulfilled which was 
spoken by the Lord through 
the prophet saying, 


Behold the virgin shall 
be with child, and shall 
bring forth a son, And 
they shall call his name 
Immanuel; 


which is, being interpreted, 
God with us. And Joseph 
arose from his sleep, and did 
as the angel of the Lord 
commanded him, and _ took 
unto him his wife; and knew 
her not until she had brought 
forth a son; and he called 
his name Jesus. 


ST. LUKE 1:26 to 39 
(Continued) 


ner of salutation this should 
be. And the angel said unto 
her, Fear not, Mary, for thou 
hast found favour with God. 
And behold, thou shalt con- 
ceive in thy womb and bring 
forth a son, and shalt call 
his name Jesus. He shall be 
great, and shall be called the 
Son of the Most High; and 
the Lord God shall give un- 
to him the throne of his 
father David: and he shall 
reign over the house of 
Jacob for ever; and of his 
kingdom there shall be no 
end. And Mary said unto the 
angel, How shall this be, see- 
ing I know not a man? And 
the angel answered and said 
unto her, The Holy Ghost 
shall come upon thee, and the 
power of the Most High shall 
overshadow thee; wherefore 
also that which is to be born 
shall be called holy, the Son 
of God. And behold, Elisa- 
beth thy kinswoman, she also 
hath conceived a son in her 
old age: and this is the sixth 
month with her that was 
called barren. For no word 
from God shall be void of 
power. And Mary said, Be- 
hold, the handmaid of the 
Lord; be it unto me accord- 
ing to thy word. And the 
angel departed from her. 


22 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


The first question to ask concerning these 
crucial passages is, are they authentic parts of 
the Gospels in which they appear? Could they 
not be regarded as later interpolations? 

Until the invention of printing in the 15th 
century all copies of the Bible, as of every- 
thing else in literature, were of course in man- 
uscript form. There are a great many manu- 
scripts of the Bible in existence—about two 
thousand, it is said. Some, called uncials, in 
round capital letters, are very ancient, two go- 
ing back to the fourth century. Others, of a lat- 
er date, called cursives, in a running hand, are 
often of great value to the student as being 
accredited copies of more ancient manuscripts. 
Besides these Greek manuscripts there are very 
old versions of the New Testament in other 
languages—notably, Latin, Syriac, and Egyp- 
tian. Furthermore, we have voluminous quota- 
tions of the Scriptures found in the writings of 
the earliest Christian authors, and also the 
lectionaries, or passages of scripture used in the 
old liturgies. Altogether, it is a well stocked 
storehouse of information concerning the true 
text of the New Testament, to which we have 
access in these ways, and we may rest assured 
that what we read today in our Revised Version 


The Birth Stories 23 


is substantially what Christians read in Greek 
in the earliest ages of the Church. And the 
verdict of the old manuscripts concerning the 
authenticity of the birth narratives in St. 
Matthew and St. Luke is unanimous. Without 
exception among the uncials, cursives, and ver- 
sions, all bear testimony to the fact that those 
narratives are integral parts of the Gospels 
in which they are found. One old Latin cur- 
sive of high authority has a curious change in 
St. Luke’s narrative, omitting verse 34 of the 
Ist chapter and inserting verse 38 in its place. 
I mention this only for the sake of exactness. 
The change does not modify the unanimity of 
the verdict. So far as documentary evidence is 
concerned, the fact that our Lord was born of 
a Virgin mother is as truly attested as is the 
fact that He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. 
Those critics who still maintain that the birth 
narratives were late interpolations, put in for 
doctrinal reasons, are assuming something for 
which there is not one shred of evidence and 
which is contradicted by all the impressive tes- 
timony of the entire array of manuscripts in 
existence. 

Taking, then, these perfectly attested stories 
of our Saviour’s birth, which are textually on a 


24. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


par with everything else in the New Testa- 
ment, what can we say in general of their qual- 
ities and characteristics ? 

In the first place, I think it must be evident 
to all that these birth narratives purport to re- 
late something which actually occurred; in 
other words, they are plainly not allegorical. 
Whoever first wrote those little accounts mani- 
festly believed that what they wrote was liter- 
ally true and naturally expected their readers 
to take it all in that sense. There is not the 
slightest suggestion of symbolism or of alle- 
gory to be found in either narrative. As is the 
case throughout the first three Gospels in gen- 
eral, so here, the style is perfectly simple and 
direct. Furthermore, there is a manifest art- 
lessness in the writing, which, under other cir- 
cumstances—I mean, apart from the miracle 
which is related—would undoubtedly disarm 
all criticism and invalidate any suggestion of 
ulterior motive. This perfect disingenuousness 
of the writers is well illustrated by their uncon- 
scious freedom in using the word “father” 
when referring to St. Joseph, and in speaking 
of “parents” as well. Critics sometimes argue 
that the employment of these terms actually 
contradicts the plain assertions of the miracu- 
lous conception; but such an objection has no 


The Birth Stories 25 


weight whatever, and, indeed, reacts against 
the critics who make it. If the writers of the 
narratives had shown a meticulous carefulness 
in the choice of words, scrupulously avoiding 
any reference to St. Joseph as father of the 
Child, we might have some ground for suspect- 
ing them of insincerity or of fabricating the 
whole story. St. Joseph was ‘father’ of the 
Child in a legal sense and by common belief 
and consent—although St. John plainly hints 
at scandal existing during our Lord’s manhood. — 
He was “father” for the protection and sup- 
port of both mother and baby. We may sup- 
pose that he thought of himself as ‘“‘father’’ to 
Jesus, even though he knew perfectly well that 
the little Child was a direct gift from God. We 
shall do well to look upon such phraseology as 
we find here as perfectly natural and as true to 
historical and psychological principles. Our 
narratives, then, plainly give the effect of stor- 
ies told by men who were so completely assured 
of the truth of what they were telling that 
they were not in the least troubled by backward 
thoughts as to the credibility of their tales in 
the minds of their readers. 

2. Then, again, notice that the two accounts are 
completely independent of each other. They 
both tell the same central fact, but they tell it 


26 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


not only in utterly different language but also 
from entirely different sources of information. 
As has often been pointed out for centuries 
past, and as is perfectly obvious from a com- 
parison of just the short parts which have been 
quoted here, St. Matthew’s account of the 
Saviour’s birth reads like the story of St. . 
Joseph himself, while that of St. Luke seems 
to be the story of St. Mary. At least we may 
say this, that, assuming for the moment that 
the narratives relate actual truth, the facts 
which are given as to the thoughts in the hearts 
of those concerned and the words to the angels 
could have come only from St. Joseph in the 
one case and from St. Mary in the other. 
There would be no other possible sources of 
the information. This is a point of great inter- 
est in itself, but for the present I would merely 
suggest its bearing on the theory that the story 
of the virgin birth is of legendary origin. The 
two accounts are so different that the supposi- 
tion that they are simply two versions of one 
and the same early legend would seem very 
dificult to entertain. If the whole story were 
only legendary or mythical—and that, of 
course, is the theory of most of the opposing 
critics—then we should have two completely 
independent legends, clearly of independent or- 


The Birth Stories 27 


igin, of exactly the same event! The two leg- 
ends would touch each other only at two points 
—the virginity of the mother and the birth in 
Bethlehem. In all the details and especially in 
the manifestly opposite sources of information, 
they would diverge so completely as to make 
the legend theory extremely hard to explain. 
It is perfectly possible to conceive of Christ- 
legends appearing at a very early date, and, 
indeed, as we shall see later on, there actually 
were such legends in plenty in the late first 
century and second century. Also, we ought to 
be ready to admit that legendary matter might 
have found its way into the body of the Gos- 
pels without the writers being aware of its 
character. But that one and the same basic 
legend should assume such utterly different 
forms as we find in St. Matthew and St. Luke 
involves such a degree of deliberate fraud on 
the part of the writers as is inconsistent with 
the qualities of the narratives which we are con- 
sidering. If there had been only one narrative, 
say that of St. Matthew, then a legend theory 
would be not so hard to understand; but when 
you add St. Luke’s entirely different and in- 
dependent account, then the theory becomes 
a poser. But, if we assume for the time that 
the story is true to fact, all the differences in 


28 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


the accounts given by the foster-father and the 
virgin mother are perfectly comprehensible, 
and in the end become congruous. In other 
words, to sum this matter up, if we ignore for 
the present the difficulty of belief in the mirac- 
ulous, the two accounts which we have of our 
Saviour’s birth give us, on purely internal evi- 
dence, the strongest reason for looking for 
their source in fact, not in legend. 

3 Another characteristic of both accounts is 
their primitive and Jewish tone. They read al-_ 
most like bits from the Old Testament. As 
some of the ablest adverse critics themselves 
maintain, they are probably the most archaic 
writings in the New Testament. Not only are 
they clearly of Jewish origin, but they belong 
to that element of Judaism which best repre- 
sented the old and finest traditions of Hebrew 
life. The prologue of St. Luke, the first four 
verses, is written in good literary Greek of the 
period; but from those opening verses we pass 
immediately into a very different language, and 
into scenes and into the presence of people 
strongly suggestive of a much earlier day in Is- 
rael. We find a little group of men and women 
of deep faith and pure devotion, constant in 
prayer and attendance at the Temple, always 
full of hope for the fulfilment of God’s prom- 


The Birth Stories 29 


ises of redemption, living in quietness and 
peace and love. The atmosphere and environ- 
ment suggested in St. Matthew and St. Luke 
are full of charm and beauty, but the old 
Hebraic flavor of the narratives is also a mat- 
ter of great importance to bear in mind in a 
study of our subject, as we shall see when we 
come to consider the theory of gentile influence 
in the development of a birth legend. We need 
only to note for the present, that, whether leg- 
endary or based on fact, the story of the 
Saviour’s birth springs only out of Jewish soil, 
and that it was a growth of the very earliest 
years in the life of the little Christian-Hebrew 
group in Palestine. 

4 Again, let us notice that the birth narratives 
are devoid of theological tone or teaching. It 
has been supposed by some critics that they 
were used by the writers of the first and third 
Gospels in order to reénforce the doctrine of 
our Lord’s Divinity; but, apart from the fact 
that neither of those Gospels is in itself theo- 
logical, except by implication, the characteris- 
tics of the birth narratives do not easily lend 
themselves to dogmatic use. The narratives tell 
—that is all—though they tell with a delicacy, 
reserve, simplicity, and beauty that are not far 
from being marks of inspiration in themselves. 


30 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


It is true that we find in them such expressions 
as, ‘King of the Jews’, “Son of the Most 
High’’, ‘“‘A Saviour which is Christ, the Lord’, 
yet I think it would be difficult to derive the 
doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity from such 
phraseology. As compared with the language 
of St. John’s Gospel or the epistles of St. Paul, 
such expressions seem devoid of any definite 
theological import. If, as has been suggested, 
the narratives were introduced later in order 
to strengthen the doctrine of the Incarnation, 
as that doctrine was gradually developed and 
perceived in the Church, at any rate it seems 
impossible that they could have been written 
with a view to that doctrine, or any other 
teaching. 

Finally, these narratives show not a trace of 
ascetic feeling. Among the Jews, before and 
after our Saviour’s birth, and among Chris- 
tians of the second century and later, there 
were strongly marked ascetic movements in 
which celibacy was practised and virginity was 
accounted as of higher moral worth than mar- 
riage. There is, however, none of this feeling 
in our narratives, although certain modern 
writers have thought that the story of the vir- 
gin birth owes its existence to the influence of 
a growing asceticism in certain parts of the 


The Birth Stories 31 


Church. I do not think that the theory has 
many supporters, and it is, of course, quite at 
variance with the tone and characteristics of 
the birth narratives. Let me say with all rever- 
ence that there is not a hint in either of the 
Gospel stories which could possibly suggest 
that doctrine so dear to later Christian 
thought, namely, the perpetual virginity of St. 
Mary. One may believe that doctrine on other 
grounds, but the tradition on which it may be 
based or the instinct which seems to require it 
does not appear in the New Testament ac- 
counts of the Nativity. There is no exaltation 
of virginity to be found in either record. 
Among the great mass of the Jewish people 
‘Marriage was honorable and the bed unde- 
filed”, and no other feeling than this can be 
detected in the birth narratives. However we 
may explain the reason for the birth of Jesus 
Christ apart from normal human generation, 
it has nothing at all to do with any supposed 
moral or spiritual excellence connected with 
the virginal condition. It is not because a vir- 
gin birth is more seemly than a natural birth 
that the New Testament stories came into be- 
ing or that orthodox theology today is loyal 
to the old belief. Although the Evangelists do 
relate a stupendous miracle, yet their tone is 


32 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


normal and wholesome. The reason for the 
miracle is to be explained on quite other 
grounds than by a supposed special fitness or 
propriety in being a virgin rather than a mar- 
ried woman. 

There are many other features of the nar- 
ratives which it would be interesting to con- 
sider, such as the two and very different geneal- 
ogies, the omission in St. Matthew of the first 
residence in Nazareth, the omission in St. Luke 
of the flight into Egypt, and other details; but 
space forbids a full discussion of the various 
questions which are connected with our sub- 
ject. [he two accounts are so very different 
that at first sight it may seem impossible to 
reconcile them with each other. But, with a 
little study, it will be found that they can be 
harmonized perfectly; and ultimately it will be 
seen that the marked differences between the 
two testify clearly to the good faith of the 
writers, rule out all thought of collusion, and 
make it extremely difficult, to say the least, to 
account for the narratives by referring them to 
a legendary origin. 


Itt 
MIRACLES 


“TO BE IN SYMPATHY with a narrative of this 
kind is especially dificult for us moderns of the 
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” So wrote 
the great Adolf Harnack, Professor of Church 
History in the University of Berlin; and his 
words reveal the chief and age-old objection 
to the New Testament account of the Saviour’s 
birth. For that birth was a miracle. More even 
than the resurrection does the birth of Christ 
seem to contradict the inflexible law of nature 
as we know it; for, while the resurrection may 
be thought of as a great victory of life itself, 
the virgin birth appears to set aside the very 
principle of the origin of life. It is of no value 
to point to the wide prevalence of virgin birth | 
in nature—parthenogenesis, as it is called— 
and to argue, as some have done, that this is 
simply one of nature’s own ways of reproduc- 
tion. What is true of lower forms of life has 
nothing to do with man. The virgin birth was 


34. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


a special act of God, and we make a grave mis- 
take if we try to reconcile it with anything in 
man’s experience. Indeed, we may say that it 
would have no spiritual value unless it did find 
its place in a sphere apart from our experience. 
Certain New Testament students who have 
written at much length on the subject of mir- 
acles make a distinction between what is “‘su- 
pernatural” and what is‘‘miraculous’’. The life 
of God, and, to some, the person of our 
Saviour, belong to the supernatural sphere. 
There are even events of the present day 
which, according to some writers, would be re- 
garded as  supernatural—such as_ psychic 
phenomena, “‘spiritualistic’ happenings, and 
the cure of nervous disorders by faith. Muir- 
acles, however, are not super-natural, but con- 
tra-natural, and therefore not to be thought of 
as realities. Many of the healings recorded as 
done by our Lord, such as the cure of a para- 
lytic, are supernatural acts, at least based on 
fact, and therefore believable. Other of the 
healings, such as giving sight to the blind, and 
all the nature miracles, like the stilling of the 
tempest, are contrary to nature and therefore 
not believable. The virgin birth and the resur- 
rection would come under the head of ‘“‘mir- 
acles’’—impossible and incredible things. 


Miracles as 


Such a distinction appears to me invalid and 
fallacious. What do we really know of natural 
law? Each year we live seems to bring new 
knowledge of an ever widening sphere of na- 
ture, and to suggest the need of a revision of 
the earlier theories and conclusions of science. 
Some things which would have been “‘miracu- 
lous” to people fifty years ago are every day 
matters now. If we admit the existence of su- 
pernatural life, if we confess to a belief in God, 
what right have we to say where the natural 
ends, or how far the supernatural may over- 
span our experience? Is it not truer and more 
reasonable to think of the supernatural as the 
all-embracing realm, including what we call na- 
ture within itself ? Is not this the thought which 
lies back of St. Paul’s well-known words to the 
Athenians, “For in him we live and move and 
have our being’? What we call natural law, 
or the course of nature, may be thought of as 
simply the orderly but incomplete expression 
of supernatural law in a limited existence, an 
existence which is sure to pass away. What we 
call miracles, therefore, are not necessarily 
against nature, but are temporary manifesta- 
tions in the limited life of men of the greater 
enfolding supernatural life—a life so much 
vaster, so much more permanent than what we 


36 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


know by experience, that it may be thought of 
as the normal rather than the abnormal. 
Viewed in this way the virgin birth and the 
resurrection are not really contrary to nature, 
but rather are proofs of a larger nature than 
our limited knowledge lets us understand. If 
I speak of the virgin birth as a stupendous 
miracle, it is simply in recognition of the un- 
fathomable life surrounding us—a life from 
which there flowed to produce that birth a 
power which is not contrary to natural law, 
but which came to aid natural law; not to set 
nature aside, but to bring nature nearer God. 
But such thoughts as these make little im- 
pression upon a materialistic age. The chief 
reason for the modern repudiation of the old 
belief that our Lord Jesus Christ had no earth- 
ly father is that for the most part the modern 
world shakes its head when asked to believe a 
miracle. It would, of course, be impossible in 
a little book like this to go thoroughly into all 
of the many ideas brought up by a considera- 
tion of this subject of the supernatural, but 
there are a few thoughts which I should like 
to suggest to those whose minds are troubled 
as to the credibility of the wonders related in 
the New Testament—and I think that means a 
great many people in every denomination at 


Miracles | 37 


this present time. We read of our Lord turn- 
ing water into wine, feeding a host on a few 
loaves and fishes, healing lepers, giving sight 
and hearing to the blind and deaf, and three 
times bringing back the dead to life. A minister 
of the radical school writes that a certain type 
of mind “‘sincerely believes that these abnormal 
events actually occurred simply because the 
text of the New Testament says so.” Some of 
us may be pardoned for feeling that the author- 
ity of the New Testament rests upon a sure and 
tried foundation; but we do not want to leave 
the matter so. We do not want to let the sneer 
pass and weakly admit that our faith has no 
reasonable basis. 

Probably the first thought which occurs to 
most people when they consider the prevalence 
of modern doubt is that the whole difficulty 
arises from a conflict between science and re- 
ligion. I feel that this is a mistake. There is no 
necessary conflict between science and religion. 
Each has its own field of activity, and each oc- 
cupies a different sphere from the other. Sci- 
ence takes no cognizance whatever of the 
source of the universe, but concerns itself sole- 
ly with those things in the universe which it 
can reach and study and understand. Of what 
is manifestly beyond its reach it has nothing 


38 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


either to afirm or to deny. It would not be 
scientific if it did! Of course, a great many 
modern scientists would utterly repudiate any 
belief in miracles—would not give the question 
of belief in miracles even a moment’s thought 
—would regard the whole matter as prepos- 
terous—and this for a reason which I shall 
presently suggest. On the other hand, there are 
not a few well recognized and able scientists 
who have not hesitated to confess a full belief 
in the Christian religion with all which that 
implies of acceptance of the New Testament 
record as a whole. I may name two or three 
examples among those who are no longer, liv- 
ing. There was Professor George Romanes, 
one of the foremost biologists of modern times, 
a man on whose shoulders fell a goodly share 
of the mantle of the great Darwin. The spe- 
cial value in the example of Romanes lies in 
the fact that he embraced the Christian religion 
after a whole life of agnosticism, working his 
way gradually through the obscuring clouds of 
unbelief into the clear light of faith. There was 
St. George Mivart, prominent and distin- 
guished as a naturalist. He was a devout Cath- 
olic. There was Lord Kelvin, one of the most 
brilliant scientists of modern days, famous as a 
leader and high authority among physicists; 


Miracles 39 


also, one of the staunchest and most outspoken 
believers in orthodox Christianity who have 
ever lived. And there have been many others, 
and are many others today. I have been told 
that at a meeting of scientists in this country 
not many years ago, a list of over an hundred 
recognized scientists was read, every one of 
whom was a professed believer in the religion 
of our Lord. The roll is an honorable one and 
long. No one can rightly sneer at the “‘credu- 
lity’ of such men. Their example simply goes 
to show that in the mind of a man of intellect 
and education there is room enough to hold two 
different things—the truths and hypotheses of 
science, and the revelation of God in the Bible. 
We may absolutely dismiss from our minds the 
notion that these things are in conflict with 
each other. The probability is that the leading 
spokesmen in the field of science would be the 
last of all to admit that anything is “impos- 
sible.” 

But if science in itself creates no obstacle to 
a belief in miracles, it is otherwise with what we 
may call reason. Going far back into the classic 
days of Greek life, we shall find developed a 
system of Stoic philosophy which has exercised 
a strong influence upon leading thinkers of 
every nationality down to our own day. Ac- 


40 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


cording to this philosophy the universe is a 
fixed and unchangeable system controlled solely 
by the principle of cause and effect. Nothing 
from without—such as we would call an act of 
God—can invade this sphere to modify it or to 
divert for a moment the operation of its laws. 
Nothing can disarrange the inevitable course of 
its processes. It is ‘‘closed.’’ Miracles do not 
and cannot take place. They are unthinkable. 
God does not exist as a personal Being or as a 
free determining force. If God be conceived of 
at all, it is as completely identified with nature 
—impersonal, pantheistic, devoid of will, pur- 
pose, and feeling. The world, as we know it, of 
ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast, and man, 
passes through its steadily succeeding cycles of 
age following age, day and night, winter and 
summer, tempest and calm, feeding and growth, 
birth and death, in inexorable conformity with 
the principles which have controlled its develop- 
ment for untold millions of years, since the sun 
and planets were but a whirling nebular mist. 
Existence does not call for explanation. It is. 
Given the fact of physical matter in any form, 
and the principles of energy, molecular change, 
gravitation, and the like, account with mathe- 
matical precision for all the phenomena of life. 
The birth of a human child points inevitably to 


Miracles 41 


a union of man and woman. Such a tale as the 
evangelists tell may be gently dismissed as only 
poetry or a dream. 

It is probable that few of us are consciously 
influenced by this rigid system of thought, but I 
believe that practically all Western civilization 
is to a greater or less degree under its spell. 
The interests of our time favor a strongly ma- 
terial view of life. Certainly to active students 
of science such a philosophy as I have sketched 
must appeal as a most plausible and reasonable 
basis of thought; because in any special field— 
say chemistry—the student does actually find 
that there is no deviation in nature’s steps. 
Given pure iron and moisture, and rust doth 
corrupt. This is why I said above that many 
scientists today find no room in their minds for 
the supernatural. Their unvarying experience 
would seem necessarily to rule out all but the 
normal processes of nature. And I believe that 
this view of the universe has a stronger hold 
upon the imagination of men in our day than 
ever before. 

We cannot answer this philosophy except 
by saying that we do not and cannot believe it. 
There is no debating the issue between those 
who believe in a personal and righteous God 
and those who give intellectual worship to a 


42 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


deity which is simply mechanical, impersonal 
nature. Some light may come to us, however, 
while we are trying to solve the deep problem 
of existence, by remembering that in the final 
analysis, however unchangeable nature may 
seem, man himself is free. In spite of the awful 
power of heredity, environment, and habit, deep 
in man’s spiritual nature lies the inexpressible 
gift of choice. And, when choice is exercised, for 
good or ill, then man’s physical, outward action 
is determined. In other words, man, who is cer- 
tainly a part of nature, is not simply the help- 
less effect of blind, impersonal cause, but, at 
least in his moral life, far transcends nature and 
controls nature and subdues nature, introducing 
into that “‘closed,’’ immutable system a new 
thing, a determining force—the will of a free 
being. If this be true of man, who is a part of 
nature, how much truer must it be of the God 
in whom we believe, in whom we live and move 
and have our being—the God who vivifies as 
well as transcends nature? 

The connection between the above thought 
and what we may perhaps call our intellectual 
privilege of believing in miracles, lies in this: 
Man, by the selfish exercise of his free choice, 
has introduced into the universe a malign and 
destructive element—what we call sin. He has 


Miracles 43 


disrupted and disarranged the orderly and be- 
neficent course of a good world as designed by 
the Creator. Let us not hesitate to say that ina 
perfectly true sense he has successfully thwarted 
God’s plan. And to what an awful extent the 
ravages of human selfishness and cruelty have 
invaded all organic life, plant and animal as 
well as human, it is almost impossible to con- 
ceive. [he sciences of medicine and biology shed 
much light upon this matter, but they do not 
touch upon the moral injury which man is con- 
stantly inflicting, and which, in its turn, changes 
for worse the very face of the earth. Is it un- 
reasonable to suppose that God in His free life 
as the vivifier of the natural world should, at 
least at great crises in the affairs of men, inter- 
vene to assert the moral supremacy of His will? 
If nature itself is controlled by order and law, 
if the essence of the Divine life be characterized 
by order and law, then, when the moral order 
and law of the world are foully broken by self- 
ishness, can we suppose that He whose Name is 
Love, He whopwe believe gives life to all, will 
not on supreme occasions exert His power to 
restore the balance and to give assurance of the 
supremacy of His righteousness? Such interven- 
tion would necessarily be most exceptional, 
otherwise the inexpressible value of human 


44. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


righteousness as the result of man’s own choice 
would be lost. But there have been times, per- 
haps are times now in individual life, when evil 
has become so intense that the best efforts of 
righteous men become benumbed and impotent. 
The culmination of human evil may be thought 
of as reached in the crucifixion. Does not that 
cry aloud to God for nothing short of the resur- 
rection? 

I am conscious of the extreme difficulty of 
this line of reasoning, and know that it would 
take far more space than can be given in this 
small book to treat it at all adequately. Bishop 
Gore, in Chapters 9 and 10 of Belief in God, 
gives a most masterly and impressive discussion 
of the whole matter. I cannot do better than 
earnestly recommend those who are interested 
in what is so fundamental to our religion to 
read the whole volume. In particular, we ought 
to give careful heed to what Bishop Gore has 


»} to say upon the inveterate prejudice which ex- 


ists among men as the result of the present 
dominance of purely material thinking. No 
search for truth can be successful if it be com- 
promised at the very start by prejudice. Such a 
method is not scientific. 

We come next to another consideration in 
our study of the problem of miracles—and I 


Miracles 45 


feel that is a matter of the greatest importance. 
If we are to place any confidence in the Gospel’s 
message, if we are to believe in the historic 
Christ, we must be ready to admit that miracles 
are a part of the very warp and woof of the 
Gospels. In all the four records our Lord is 
represented as doing wonders all the time. Su- 
pernatural power is there set forth as charac- 
teristic of His nature—inherent in it. Detailed 
accounts of miracles are so inextricably woven 
into the very stuff of the Gospels that we cannot 
get them out without rending the fabric of the 
message. What remains after we cut the super- 
natural out from the evangelists’ story is too 
meager and disconnected to offer any reason- 
able basis for belief. Critics have tried to do 
this very thing—have rejected every item of the 
miraculous deeds of Christ, denying the virgin 
birth in toto, explaining away the healings as 
the result of helping people who imagined they 
were ailing, denying the fact of the empty tomb 
and reducing the resurrection to a psychological 
consciousness of an abiding spiritual presence— 
whatever that may mean. The resulting Jesus of 
the critics is too vague and shadowy a figure to 
make any impression upon the heart and con- 
science of the world. If it be objected that we 
still have Christ’s words and teaching and sub- 


46 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


lime character, I would say that I am not at all 
sure we have anything left after the modern 
editors have finished their improved version of 
the four ancient records. Certainly we have not 
always His words left in any recognizable 
form; for these are often so closely connected 
with the miracles that when the latter are ex- 
cised the words begin to tumble, too. Think for 
a moment how complete is the association in 
the records between our Lord’s words and His 
deeds. Few passages in the New [estament are 
of greater spiritual interest than the discourse 
on the Bread of Life in St. John vi. But the 
discourse is based entirely on the miracle of the 
great feeding, told in the same chapter, and 
opens with a reference to that miracle in so 
many words. Eliminate the miracle, and what 
becomes of the discourse? Or, take the Sermon 
on the Mount. The reason for the gathering of 
the multitude, from whom our Lord withdrew 
into the mountain, was the fame of His miracles 
which had spread throughout all Syria; and, 
“when he was come down from the mountain’”’, 
the very first thing that is recorded is the heal- 
ing of a leper. Or, again, what are we going 
to do with the perennially vital declaration, “I 
am the resurrection and the life. He that be- 
lieveth. . .,” etc., if we reject the raising of 


Miracles 47 


Lazarus? Over and over again we shall find the 
best known sayings of Christ are practically a 
part of the miracles which He performed. His 
teaching about the sabbath, the Holy Spirit, 
forgiveness, His calling of the Twelve, His 
reiterated ‘“Thy faith hath saved thee,” all 
come to us in the closest conjunction with acts 
of supernatural power. In the sixth chapter of 
St. Luke we read of a great multitude of peo- 
ple from Judea and the seacoast who thronged 
about Him. Why did they come? “To hear Him 
and to be healed of their diseases.” ‘The two 
things, Christ’s words and Christ’s miracles, are 
linked in the Gospels in a natural and indis- 
soluble union. They belong to each other. 

But the effect upon the integrity of the Gos- 
pel records which results from a general elimi- 
nation of the miracles goes much farther. The 
distrust which is engendered by such a refusal 
to credit the value of the evangelists’ testimony 
in one matter very naturally and logically ex- 
tends to other matters. Representatives of the 
modernistic school of interpreters are far from 
being in close agreement with each other in 
their final conclusions; but their tendency is 
manifest—and is perfectly reasonable from 
their standpoint—and that tendency is to inject 
the element of doubt into the whole story of 


48 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


Jesus Christ as it is presented in the New Testa- 
ment. The authenticity of a large share of 
Christ’s sayings and teaching has been ques- 
tioned and disputed, now by one group of 
writers, now by another. Record is compared 
with record, differences of phraseology are 
ascribed to the individual bias of the writers, 
discourses, parables, prayers, all are found so 
full of glosses that what our Lord really said 
is left most uncertain, and almost any statement 
or phrase which can be accounted for by the 
later development of Christian doctrine is ruled 
out from the Gospel tradition. There is “very 
weak evidence”’ for the authenticity of the bap- 
tismal formula—Christ never thought or spoke 
of Himself as the Son of God—the prayer, 
‘Our Father,” is not necessarily authentic, all 
references to the destruction of Jerusalem be- 
long to a period after the year seventy—the 
whole account of the passion and crucifixion is 
full of legendary matter—and so on. Even our 
Saviour’s sinless character is not spared, for the 
baptism indicates penitence for wrong done in 
the past, and specific instances of moral imper- 
fection are cited. That Christ Himself was but 
a beautiful myth would seem to be the logical 
end—and there are not wanting advocates of 
even this theory. 


Miracles 49 


It must not be supposed from all this that criti- 
cism of the New [Testament is to be deprecated. 
Far from it. We owe a great debt of gratitude 
to the long, patient, and scholarly labors of New 
Testament critics for many years past, even 
though oftentimes their conclusions have not 
seemed warranted. The work which has been 
done during the last fifty years and more in the 
Church history of the first centuries is of the 
very highest importance to an understanding of 
our origins. Moreover, some of the most dis- 
tinguished and scholarly critics have done val- 
iant work in behalf of the faith set forth by St. 
John and St. Paul—the faith in our Lord as 
“God of God,” divine and eternal in His per- 
son. Neither must it be supposed that verbal in- 
fallibility is for a moment claimed any longer 
for the Bible in any of its books. It is obvious 
that there are minor inaccuracies and contradic- 
tions in the different records. Such imperfections 
do not in the least impair the integrity of the 
Gospel narrative as a whole or weaken its au- 
thority, but rather testify to the sincerity and 
independence of the writers. On the other hand, 
we may say without the slightest hesitation that 
certain presuppositions of the radical critics 
during the last century are insurmountable bar- 
riers to a real understanding of what the evan- 


50 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


gelists had to tell. Those presuppositions are, 
in brief, that miracles are impossible and that 
Christ was only human. The records will not 
stand the strain of these two underlying concep- 
tions of the advanced school of critics. Under 
the weight of these radical axioms the Gospels 
fall to pieces. 

Finally, it must be remembered that not only 
is the Gospel record filled full from beginning 
to end with specific and detailed accounts of 
miracles, but also that our Lord himself is pre- 
sented to us as a living miracle of goodness. In 
the moral sphere He comes to us as the embodi- 
ment of a positive, militant righteousness so ut- 
terly different not only in degree but in kind 
from anything found before or since in the 
human race, that it may be said to supervene the 
natural law of the life of men. We recognize in 
Him not only innocence, but an active source of 
moral strength for the entire race. The virgin 
birth was the beginning of a life lived com- 
pletely on a superhuman level. On the score that 
that birth violates the law of nature there is no 
more reason for rejecting it than there is for 
rejecting the sinlessness of Christ or the posi- 
tive perfections of His humanity. Indeed, we 
may say that of the two things, the physical 
and the moral miracle, the latter is the greater 


Miracles 51 


wonder. That human nature should be found in 
any individual life as not only always and suc- 
cessfully antagonistic to every form of evil, but 
also in itself as uninterruptedly creative of the 
highest good, is something which we must rec- 
ognize as transcending all our notions of what 
is possible to man. Such, however, is the human 
nature of our Lord as portrayed in the Gospel 
pages—a miracle of moral power, utterly un- 
known in the experience of men. 


IV 
THE “SILENCE” 


Ir MusT NOT be supposed that the virgin 
birth of Christ will ever be an easy thing for 
men in general to believe. Even if the fact of 
the New Testament miracles as a whole be es- 
tablished on reasonable grounds, still there is 
in the miracle of Christ’s birth an element which 
makes it especially difficult to accept, for there 
is nothing which is quite so rudimentary in hu- 
man experience and in racial instinct as is the 
normal process of the beginning of human life. 
A religious tradition which starts by eliminat- 
ing human fatherhood from the productive 
causes of the life of a child cuts too deeply into 
the primal consciousness of untold generations 
of men to permit it to stand without the most 
vehement protest and opposition. And so we 
must expect that whatever might be thought 
of as weakening the validity of the primitive 
tradition as we have it in St. Matthew and St. 
Luke, will always be brought forward and em- 


The “Silence” 53 


phasized by those who discredit the virgin 
birth. 

Now, apart from the question of miracles in 
general, the most serious objection urged 
against the truth of the Gospel narratives is 
this: that nowhere in all the New Testament is 
the virgin birth of our Lord told or referred 
to excepting in the few verses from the evan- 
gelists which we have considered. Everywhere 
else the whole matter is utterly ignored. Why, 
it is asked, is there such a remarkable and 
unanimous silence on the part of all the other 
writers if such an amazing miracle had occurred 
or even if it were supposed to have occurred? 
The objection sounds like a reasonable one, and 
it must be sufficiently answered. 

On general grounds we may say that there 
was no compelling reason for referring to the 
circumstances of the birth of Christ at all in 
any of the books from which it is omitted. St. 
Mark’s Gospel—the oldest—simply gives the 
substance of the apostles’ teaching—that is, the 
ministry of Christ from the baptism to the as- 
cension. St. John’s Gospel—by much the latest 
—is supplementary. It does not repeat the con- 
tents of the other three excepting in the case of 
the great feeding and in connection with the 
closing scenes. So far as St. Paul and the other 


$4. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


epistle writers are concerned, they do not pro- 
fess to narrate events at all. Their interest lies 
in an interpretation and application of the life 
of Jesus. Moreover, we may say that the fact 
of the virgin birth was a matter of such inti- 
mate, delicate nature, hardly to be spoken of 
at first, that there is little likelihood of its hav- 
ing been known at all, outside of a very limited 
group, until it was revealed by the evangelists. 
It could hardly have formed a part of the apos- 
tolic preaching, and was manifestly not the 
source of the deep conviction of the eyewit- 
nesses as to the character and true nature of our 
Lord’s being. The realization of who and what 
our Lord was came with the growing conscious- 
ness of His character and work and message. 
The wonderful nature of His birth, known 
originally to only two persons in the world, 
emerged at last in the gently, almost shyly, told 
story which we have today. To say that it must 
have been known to St. John and St. Paul seems 
to me almost self-evident; but it does not fol- 
low that they would use it in their writings to 
the churches. As compared with the character 
of Jesus, declared by apostolic witness, and 
with the great public proclamation of divine 
approval involved in the resurrection, the vir- 
gin birth of Christ was on another plane—too 


The “Silence” 55 


sacred, too intimately knit with a holy woman’s 
life, to be used in preaching or in controversy. 

It is not by any means certain, however, that 
the silence of the New Testament writers in 
general is quite so profound as is usually 
thought to be the case. 

We can say, to begin with, that there is 
nothing in any of the books which can be twisted 
into a denial of the virgin birth or into an as- 
sertion of human paternity. I have already 
spoken of the perfectly natural use of the words 
‘‘father’® and ‘“‘parents’’ in the birth narratives 
themselves. In addition to this, we ought to no- 
tice just four other instances of similar lan- 
guage—St. Matthew xiii, 55; St. Luke iv, 22; 
St. John i, 45; and St. John vi, 42. These all 
speak of our Lord as the son of Joseph or the 
son of the carpenter; but it is to be noted that 
these passages are by no means assertions of an 
earthly parentage, but are merely the quoted 
words of neighbors or of a future disciple, in- 
dicative of the current belief at the time they 
were spoken that Jesus was the son of Joseph 
and Mary. St. Luke, at the opening of his 
genealogy, states this current belief in so many 
words: ‘‘And Jesus himself began to be about 
thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) 
the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli,” 


56 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


etc. [t was a supposition which, we may be sure, 
St. Mary herself would be by no means desirous 
of correcting in a public way. St. Joseph was no 
longer living. The passages which speak of 
Christ as the “son of David” call for only a 
little consideration. St. Joseph was, of course, 
of the house and lineage of David; but even if 
St. Mary were not of that same line—as is un- 
certain—the position of Jesus as legal or puta- 
tive son of Joseph entitled Him to the use of 
the cognomen ‘Son of David.” The phrase is 
in no way inconsistent with the virgin birth. 

In addition to this negative side of the case 
there are certain expressions and allusions in the 
New Testament which are in striking harmony 
with the tradition of the virgin birth. I will in- 
stance what seems to me the most significant 
of these passages. 

Take, first, St. Mark’s Gospel—the earliest. 
Each of the other evangelists begins with some 
reference to what we may call antecedents. In 
St. Matthew, it is the experience of St. Joseph. 
In St. Luke, it is the birth of St. John Baptist. 
In St. John, we have the eternal pre-existence of 
our Lord as the ‘“‘Word.”’ St. Mark begins with 
the baptism; but note well his opening words: 
“The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, 
the Son of God.” I would not for a moment 


The “Silence” 57 


maintain that this language even suggests the 
virgin birth, although, in the position in which 
it occurs it is strongly reminiscent of the angel’s 
words to the Virgin Mary; but, bearing in mind 
this expression, “Son of God,” at the very open- 
ing of the Gospel, let the reader compare it with 
another and apparently deliberate choice of 
words on the part of St. Mark. As we have al- 
ready noticed, neither St. Matthew nor St. 
Luke, though each had definitely told of the 
virgin birth in clearest language, hesitated to 
use the word “‘father”’ of St. Joseph, or to quote 
others as speaking of the “‘son of Joseph,” or, 
‘son of the carpenter.’ St. Mark, on the other 
hand, appears unwilling to use such language 
even in quotation, for, in the parallel passage, 
he adopts instead this expression: “Is not this 
the carpenter, the son of Mary?’ He does not, 
indeed, use the name of Joseph once in his Gos- 
pel. Now this is a very striking fact, for the 
almost invariable Hebrew usage is to name the 
father rather than the mother. ‘“‘Jesus Bar-jo- 
seph,’” would be the expected form. Oddly 
enough, it was certain German radical critics 
of a good many years ago who seized upon this 
usage of St. Mark and declared it was a plain 
indication of his belief in the virgin birth. Their 
deduction from this was that St. Mark’s Gospel 


58 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


must be of late date. It is now generally agreed 
that the Gospel was the earliest, but the striking 
suggestiveness of St. Mark’s language remains. 
Taken in conjunction with his use of the phrase, 
‘Son of God,” in the position in which it occurs, 
this deliberate departure from the tradition 
followed by St. Matthew and St. Luke cer- 
tainly turns the “‘silence’’ of St. Mark into a 
two-edged sword. It cuts one way as well as 
the other. It would seem to me a silence that 
gives consent. 

Then take St. John. In this Gospel, the latest 
to appear, we enter into an entirely different 
atmosphere and realm of thought. I shall as- 
sume that it was written by the Apostle John, 
the son of Zebedee, for I can see no reason 
whatever for believing otherwise. But even if 
it were the work of another John, possibly 
someone in the circle at Ephesus close to the old 
Apostle, its date—about the year 95—and its 
apostolic authority are sufficiently established 
for our purposes. Now the object in view in the 
writing of this Gospel is succinctly stated in 
chapter 20, verse 31. “But these are written, 
that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, 
the Son of God; and that believing ye might 
have life through his name.” This object of the 
evangelist does not require the virgin birth 


The “Silence” 59 


either as a foundation or as a buttress. Belief 
in Jesus Christ as the eternally begotten Son of 
the Most High rests upon the whole presenta- 
tion of His life and words in the Gospel. But 
the close harmony of thought between this be- 
lief and the miraculous mode of our Saviour’s 
entrance into the world of human life is so ob- 
vious that one would naturally look for some 
indication of this harmony in the language of a 
writer whose object it was to establish faith in 
the Divinity of our Lord and who was perfectly 
cognizant of the manner of His birth. I do not 
think that signs of consciousness of this under- 
lying harmony are hard to find. ‘““The Word 
was made flesh.” Is this a normal reference to 
a normal birth into this world? If St. John had 
disbelieved the story, well known by that time, 
would he have used such language to describe 
the birth of Jesus? I find it hard to believe so. 
Certainly St. John’s phrase fits in perfectly with 
the story narrated by St. Matthew and St. 
Luke. 

But just before this statement which I have 
taken from the 14th verse of the ist chapter, 
there is another statement so strangely apposite 
to our subject that it has claimed the attention 
of commentators for centuries. I may be par- 
doned, therefore, for dwelling at some length 


60 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


upon the significance of the Apostle’s words in 
the 13th verse. As given in our version, it reads: 
“which were born not of blood, nor of the will 
of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of 
God.” The reference is pretty clearly to a new 
spiritual birth for those who believe on the 
name of Christ. But note well the very unusual 
language. There are four separate expressions, 
each denoting plainly a human birth arising 
from a superhuman source. That birth was not 
(1) “of blood.” ‘The Greek, however, says ‘‘of 
bloods,” suggesting the mingling life of parents 
in human generation. It was not (2) “of the 
will of the flesh,” that is, the result of carnal 
instinct. It was not (3) “of the will of man’”— 
rather, ‘“‘of the will of a man,’ that is, the re- 
sult of masculine parentage. But it was (4) “of 
God,” that is, the source of the life was to be 
looked for not in any human agency, but in 
Divine power. The analogy between such lan- 
guage and the story of the virgin birth is un- 
escapable. ‘‘How shall this be, seeing that I 
know not a man?” asked Mary of the angel. 
‘“The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the 
power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: 
therefore that which is to be born shall be called 
holy, the Son of God.” The parallel is exact. I 
believe that most commentators interpret the 


The “Silence” | 61 


passage simply as a reference to the spiritual 
re-birth of believers; but the description of that 
spiritual re-birth answers so literally to the 
actual physical birth of Christ as described by 
the other evangelists, that one is forced to sup- 
pose that St. John took the virgin birth as a 
symbol of the new life of Christians. Hence, St. 
John not only knew of the virgin birth, but di- 
rectly alludes to it. 

I confess, however, that this interpretation 
seems unsatisfactory to me. Why, if thinking 
of a new life, over and above and transcending 
the natural or animal life of man, should St. 
John go to the length of this four-fold denial of 
human and, apparently, masculine parentage? 
Why not, rather, use language such as we have 
from the lips of Christ Himself in the third 
chapter? “Except a man be born again...’ It 
seems as if in the passage we are considering 
the emphasis was all on the virgin birth rather 
than on the spiritual birth. One does not lightly 
criticize the form of expression used in another 
language many centuries ago by such a person 
as “the disciple whom Jesus loved’’; but to me 
the whole passage reads awkwardly, and I am 
glad to find escape from it in another version 
of the words, which is to be found in an ancient 
Latin manuscript, as well as in the writings of 


62 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


some of the very early Christian authors. Ac- 
cording to this other reading, verse 12 should 
come to a full stop with the words, “... them 
that believe on his name.” Then verse 13 be- 
gins again, as a new sentence, without a relative 
pronoun connecting it with the previous words, 
and with a singular verb instead of a plural: 
‘‘He was born, not of bloods, nor of the will of 
the flesh, nor of the will of a man, but of God. 
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among 
us, full of grace and truth.” In other words, it 
becomes a definite assertion of the virgin birth, 
logically connected with what follows. The 
Church father, Tertullian, not only used this 
reading, but openly charged certain Greek 
heretics with having corrupted the true text in 
order to weaken the evidence for the virgin 
birth. Other ancient writers use this same read- 
ing, showing that it was widely known. Several 
modern scholars of high standing have adopted 
it. Harnack apparently has it in mind when he 
refers to “‘the true text of St. John.” Profes- 
sor Zahn, of Erlangen University, argues at 
some length for this reading as the true one, 
basing his contention in part upon the gram- 
matical construction, which, he shows, strongly 
favors it. Altogether, there is good authorita- 
tive opinion back of this reading, which I feel 


The “Silence” 63 


confident is what the evangelist wrote. In the 
face of an overwhelming manuscript testimony 
the other way, no one would be justified in 
asserting that St. John taught the virgin birth 
explicitly; but we are justified in believing so. 
In either case, however, we are justified in say- 
ing that St. John knew the story from the other 
Gospels, and had it in his mind when he wrote 
the words we have been considering at such 
length. So we may practically remove his Gospel 
as well as St. Mark’s from the list of the New 
‘Testament books which negatively disprove the 
truth of the virgin birth. 

The contention that silence on the part of 
the writers of the other New Testament books 
militates against the truth of the birth tradition, 
has little weight, simply because none of them 
professes to give any historical account of 
Christ. In the case of St. Paul, his chief interest 
lies in the Godhead of our Saviour as mani- 
fested by the cross and the resurrection. He 
does not name either Joseph or Mary, makes 
no reference to Judas Iscariot, and only once 
speaks of Pilate, nor does he mention the names 
of most of the apostles. If his silence as to the 
virgin birth were to be taken as an indication 
of either ignorance or disbelief, then his silence 
as to most of the events of our Lord’s life and 


64. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


his general omission to quote His teaching 
might be used to show his general ignorance of 
the Gospel. He does, it is true, refer in a few 
passages to the fact, though not the event, of 
Christ’s birth; but in each instance he uses a 
word to denote the fact which he nowhere uses 
of the birth of men in general. I shall have oc- 
casion to refer to this usage in more detail later 
on. For the present, however, it would be well 
to note that if St. Paul’s choice of words has 
any significance—and I think it has—it means 
that he made a clear distinction in thought be- 
tween the birth of “the express image of the 
Father” and the birth of the sons of men. His 
constant companion on his journeys was St. 
Luke, who gave the Church the most complete 
account of the virgin birth. Is it reasonable to 
suppose that, with that careful searcher for 
truth at his side, the great apostle to the gen- 
tiles could have failed to know the tradition? 
Or, is it reasonable to suppose that if he had 
learned of the virgin birth and did not believe 
it, he would not have denounced it as an old 
wives’ fable; or that St. Luke would have used 
in his Gospel matter which his great hero, St. 
Paul, discredited? ‘‘God sent forth his Son, 
born of a woman, born under the law,”’ wrote 
St. Paul. Let anyone say he is silent as to the 


The “Silence” 65 


virgin birth. His language does not suggest 
ignorance. 

With regard to the other New Testament 
writers there is no need to go into detail. The 
same general considerations apply to all. St. 
John has been covered. St. Peter is practically 
covered by considering St. Mark, who, accord- 
ing to good tradition, represents St. Peter’s 
authority in his Gospel. St. James’ epistle is 
chiefly practical. St. Jude’s writing is too brief 
to expect anything outside of his immediate 
thought. The Epistle to the Hebrews, entitled 
as one of St. Paul’s works, but more probably 
the production of someone else—possibly Apol- 
los—again concerns itself with a line of thought 
which would hardly bring in the birth of Christ 
even incidentally. The language near the open- 
ing may be thought of as sympathetic with the 
doctrine of the virgin birth, but I would not 
press the point strongly. In quoting the 2nd 
psalm, ‘“Chou art my Son, this day have I be- 
gotten thee,” the writer seems to have in mind 
the actual birth into this world of the Son of 
God. And again, in the 6th verse of the opening 
chapter, when he says, ‘‘When he bringeth the 
firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let 
all the angels of God worship him,” he uses 

language which strongly suggests an acquain- 


66 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


tance with St. Luke’s account of the shepherds 
abiding in the field by night and the singing of 
Gloria in Excelsis Deo. I do not say it is im- 
possible that the writer had this portion of the 
birth narrative in mind when he used this quo- 
tation from the Greek version of the Old Testa- 
ment, for the story of the shepherds would be 
an appealing one whenever heard—not easily 
forgotten. But the reference to angelic life is 
introduced into the epistle for quite a different 
purpose. The passage is simply an example of 
others which might be cited in which a devoutly 
receptive mind will find references or phrases 
which seem to harmonize with the tradition of 
the virgin birth of Christ. 

The conclusion which we may safely adopt is 
this: that, from the very nature of things, the 
birth narratives were not matters of wide pub- 
lic knowledge for many years, and called for 
neither reference nor comment in any of the 
omitting books. Indeed, we may say that their 
insertion in the two Gospels which do use them 
was not essential to the later contents of those 
books. In the simple, non-doctrinal form in 
which the tradition is given, its interest may be 
called merely a human one. If, however, St. 
Matthew and St. Luke felt it was desirable to 
give the earthly genealogy of Jesus, in each — 


The “Silence” 67 


case according to the line of the legal and com- 
monly accepted father, then the narratives 
which told of the entire absence of human fa- 
therhood would most naturally be included. But 
so far as all the other New Testament writers 
are concerned, no further comment is necessary. 
Their ‘‘silence”’ has no bearing upon the truth 
of the tradition. 


V 


HOW DID THE STRANGE STORY 
ARISE? WHAT THE CRITICS SAY 


To THOSE who quite naturally and simply 
believe the stories told by St. Matthew and St. 
Luke, the virgin birth of our Lord is not a 
problem. The truth is sufficient. But it is other- 
wise to those who will not accept the miracle 
as a fact or even as a possibility. Here we have 
two independent accounts of the same great 
wonder—perfectly well attested parts of the 
Gospel—as documents, quite on a par with all 
else in the books in which they are found. 
Where did they come from? How old are they? 
What suggested the amazing thing which they 
relate? What connection have they with other 
ideas in early Christian thought, or with folk- 
lore in general? Such questions have prompted 
a tremendous deal of study and research for 
about a century past—research, we may say, of 
a most valuable kind, for it takes us over a wide 
field of great interest and results in a far better 


What the Critics Say 69 


understanding of early Christian life and 
thought. It can hardly be said that there is al- 
ways a very close agreement among the radical 
critics in the answers which they give to such 
questions as I have suggested; in fact, it is just 
the other way. Starting with the premise that 
the miracle is impossible, the radical critics ex- 
plain the existence of the story in a variety of 
ways—calling it a myth, calling it a pious 
legend, or calling it a rather barefaced fraud— 
but always bravely seeking its source in some 
understandable origin. An inveterate prejudice 
against considering the possibility of the tradi- 
tion being true controls such critics and sends 
them far afield in their search for a reasonable 
explanation of the unreasonable story; and 
then, they get into trouble with each other, and 
tear each other’s theories to pieces. But, ex- 
plain the source of the story they must. 

I asked an unbelieving layman once how he 
accounted for the tradition. He answered, in 
effect, that myths analogous to the Christ- 
legend were very common in ancient times, and 
—well, that fact was enough to explain it. His 
answer was, roughly speaking, typical of a large 
class of answers made by skeptical critics. It is 
asserted that it seems to have been instinctive 
among the ancients to associate the birth of any 


70 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


great outstanding figure in mythology, legend, 
or history, with supernatural happenings; and 
especially to imagine some direct paternal re- 
lationship between a god and the child— 
whether the child became a demi-god, hero, or 
emperor. And so, beginning far back in the sec- 
ond century, the scouters of the truth of the 
virgin birth of Christ have found much satis- 
faction in bringing forward cases of so-called 
virgin birth in many an ancient myth and in 
various old religions. They have gone to Greek 
mythology and found the Danae-Perseus fable; 
to Roman superstitions regarding the birth of 
no less a person than Caesar Augustus; to old 
scandals connected with the paternity of Alex- 
ander the Great; to Buddhism; to Babylonian, 
Persian and Egyptian mythologies. In short, 
they have searched through the whole ancient 
world to find parallels to the birth tradition of 
Christ; and I think it is only fair to the be- 
lievers’ side to say that they have found no 
parallel at all. For the most part, such myths 
are obscene and carnal, so much so as to be of- 
fensive to the better-minded among the ancients 
themselves. It is not enough to cite the mere 
fact of a miracle in connection with a birth story 
to suggest a resemblance or source of the Chris- 
tian tradition. There must be some corres- 


What the Critics Say ot 


pondence in moral and spiritual tone, for the 
moral and spiritual elements in the Gospel are 
of its very essence. This is particularly and 
conspicuously the case in the beautiful little nar- 
ratives of the birth of our Lord. Furthermore, 
even disregarding the undisguisedly immoral 
tone of heathen myths about the lusts of the 
gods, one wonders, in reading them, how even 
the barest outline of the circumstances could 
possibly have suggested to Jewish-Christian 
minds such a thought as we find enshrined in 
the evangelic narratives. I suppose that the an- 
cient myth which is most conspicuously lofty in 
its moral feeling is that of Buddha; and many 
little resemblances have been found in it to the 
Christian story. But, I would ask, could the fan- 
tastic legend of a white elephant entering the 
side of the mother—who was not a virgin— 
have produced anything but repulsion in devout 
Hebrew hearts? It is of such stuff as this that 
we are supposed to find the inspiration for the 
pure story in the Gospel. 

We must not lose sight of the special charac- 
teristics of Hebrew religion. ‘he Jewish con- 
ception of God emphasized His oneness, His 
transcendence, His spiritual nature, His right- 
eousness. There would seem to be no point 
whatever where the Jewish faith and gentile 


72 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


religions could meet, so that a gentile myth 
which carried with it a conception of God ab- 
horrent to Jewish instinct could find no lodge- 
ment in the old-fashioned, devout, prayerful 
groups which we see in the narratives of St. 
Matthew and St. Luke. As I pointed out in con- 
sidering the qualities of those narratives, they 
read almost like bits out of the Old Testament. 
They are intensely Jewish, both in spirit and in 
language. Even supposing that some possible 
channel might be found through which a 
heathen myth of a great man’s birth could 
reach that little circle from which our tradition 
manifestly sprang—dquiet, simple, godly people, 
students of the Law and the Prophets, intensely 
racial in their prejudices and hopes, patiently 
waiting for the fulfilment of God’s promises— 
even supposing that a partially and superficially 
similar story to the Christ tradition could have 
reached their knowledge from a gentile source, 
we may be sure that its very origin and associa- 
tions would have prevented its having the 
slightest effect on their minds. Still less could it 
have been adopted and adapted to form the 
basis of a Jewish-Christian legend. The God of 
Israel, holy beyond the power of language to 
declare, ineffable, unapproachable, whose very 
Name must not be spoken, was not to be con- 


What the Critics Say 73 


fused with the half-human false deities of the 
gentiles. To think of Him at all in connection 
with such birth myths as were rife among the 
heathen would have been an impossibility. Pro- 
fessor Harnack, though he does not, of course, 
admit the virgin birth, has done much to de- 
molish the fabric of guesswork concerning gen- 
tile influence in accounting for the Christian 
tradition. He says: ‘“‘As for parallels with an- 
cient stories of gods and heroes, it would be 
treating them too seriously to describe them as 
scanty and feeble.” 

What then? If it was not a gentile myth 
which prompted the tradition, how about a 
Jewish source? The birth stories are most 
strikingly Jewish in themselves; is there nothing 
in old Hebrew thought which can account for 
the strange tale of a virgin birth? There is, 
answers a large group of modern critics, and it 
is right before your eyes in St. Matthew—the 
well known words: ‘‘Now all this was done, 
that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of 
the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a vir- 
gin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a 
son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, 
which being interpreted is, God with us.’’ Some 
studious Jewish-Christian in the church at Jeru- 
salem, reflecting on the strangely exact way in 


74. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


which Hebrew prophecy was fulfilled in the 
life and experience of Jesus of Nazareth, seized 
upon this prediction in the prophet Isaiah, per- 
haps reflected on the aptness of the name Em- 
manuel when applied to the Lord, and discussed 
the matter with his colleagues. ‘That would be 
enough. It is not necessary to do more than 
start an idea like this; the rest follows. The 
psychology of legendary growth is exemplified 
frequently in matters which are published in the 
daily papers. Give a lie a good start, and 
nothing will ever catch up with it. This would be 
the case especially in such a circle of enthusiasts 
as existed in the church at Jerusalem—men ut- 
terly devoted to the holy memory of their Lord, 
living in a sort of exaltation of mind and heart, 
ready to use anything which they could find in 
their own sacred writings which would exalt the 
glory or set forward the messianic claims of 
Jesus of Nazareth. It is not necessary to accuse 
them of the deliberate invention of a fiction un- 
der such circumstances. All that is required is 
the germ of the idea of a virgin birth for Christ 
—and that germ the prophet supplied. 

I believe that the above fairly represents in 
simple terms the theory of some of the most 
scholarly critics of the present time; in fact, I 
suppose that it is the most authoritative expla- 


What the Critics Say 75 


nation of the birth tradition that has been set 
forth by those who cannot accept the narratives 
of the evangelists as giving the literal truth. It 
is, of course, a plausible theory and we must 
examine it with sufficient care. To go into all 
the considerations which it involves would be 
unnecessary; but I will analyze it and try to 
show its fallacies—for it is plainly too full of 
difficulties to stand. 

1. This theory assumes that the words of 
Isaiah quoted in St. Matthew alone and by 
themselves suggested the tradition of the virgin 
birth; and therefore, the theory must assume 
also that in order to suggest that idea the words 
would be looked upon by Jewish Christians as 
prophetic of the coming of the Christ. But the 
words were not so interpreted, and no one of 
Jewish descent, at any period, would have con- 
nected the child of this passage with the ex- 
pected Messiah. Messianic prophecy was re- 
duced to an exact science by the rabbis, and all 
the Old Testament passages which referred to 
the Messiah were carefully studied and made 
the subject of synagogue instruction. ‘This 
passage, Isaiah vii, 14, was never thought of as 
predicting the birth of the Christ. We have it 
on the best authority that there is not a single 
trace of such an idea. In fact, it was explicitly 


76 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


denied by a learned Jew in the second century, 
who challenged his Christian adversary to pro- 
duce a single instance of Jewish teaching to sup- 
port the connection of this passage with the 
coming of the Messiah. 

2. The theory is seriously weakened by the 
fact that the Jews did not expect the Messiah 
to be virgin born—in fact, did not include a 
virgin birth at all in their thoughts, any more 
_ than modern critics do. There is nothing in the 
Old Testament or the writings of the rabbis to 
suggest the idea. It was an unheard of thought, 
foreign to all Hebrew notions. Even after the 
tradition had become part of the belief of the 
Church, the virgin birth of Christ was denied 
by the Ebionites, a sect of extreme Jewish Chris- 
tians. 

3. The theory requires that the word trans- 
lated ‘‘virgin” should mean exactly what we 
mean in English. In the Greek translation of 
the Old Testament, the word is parthenos, 
which does mean just what we mean by virgin 
in English. In the Hebrew original, however, 
the word is alma, which does not denote a vir- 
gin, but merely a young woman. The probability 
is that the translators of the Greek version of 
the Old Testament simply meant to say that a 
young woman who was then a virgin would 


What the Critics Say 77 


marry and bear a son and would call his name 
Emmanuel. Certainly the passage did not in- 
clude the thought of a real virgin birth so far 
as Jewish understanding went. It does not nec- 
essarily include that thought in English. But, 
above all, it could not possibly have suggested 
the idea of the virgin birth tradition to the 
Jewish-Christian circle in the old city of Jeru- 
salem, or in Alexandria or anywhere else. It is 
not a Jewish idea at all. 

4. The theory ignores the fact that the 
passage is quoted only in St. Matthew and is 
not referred to by St. Luke. If, as the theory 
goes, the whole idea that our Lord was born 
of a virgin mother started from this one 
passage in Isaiah, then any narrative which set 
forth the virgin birth would cling to the words 
of the prophet as a plant clings to its roots. St. 
Luke’s narrative, though it is, if anything, more 
intensely Hebraic than St. Matthew’s, and con- 
stantly harks back to the Old Testament in its 
phraseology and by direct quotation, exists 
quite independently of its supposed prophetic 
source. It does not mention it. Where did it 
come from? 

So much for this widely held theory of the 
origin of the Christian tradition of the birth 
of Christ. 


78 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


In view of all that I have urged against the 
idea of a virgin birth being contained or im- 
plied in the passage quoted, why, it may be 
asked, does St. Matthew use the words at all? 
I should answer that after the event of the 
birth the reference was a perfectly natural and 
legitimate one. We must remember that the 
evangelist is constantly finding sayings in the 
scripture which are ‘“‘fulfilled” in the life of Je- 
sus. A typical case of this habit of his is found 
in the very next chapter in a quotation from 
Hosea, “Out of Egypt did I call my son.” The 
clear reference, unmistakable to every reader 
nowadays, is to the deliverance of Israel from 
Egyptian bondage. Is the evangelist to be 
faulted for finding a further fulfillment of the 
words in the life of the Child Jesus? Our Lord 
Himself is constantly reported as doing much 
the same thing. The Old Testament was the 
very charter of His life. He pointed to Himself 
as the complete fulfillment of all of Israel’s 
hopes. “‘Search the scriptures,’”’ He said, “for in 
them ye believe ye have eternal life; and these 
are they which testify of me.’ And again, “‘If ye 
believe Moses ye would believe me; for he 
wrote of me.’ And so, in the passage from 
Isaiah, although it is perfectly evident that the 
words could not have suggested to any Jewish 


What the Critics Say 79 


Christian such a thing as a virgin birth, yet the 
aptness of the whole quotation is not hard to 
see. Ahaz, like Joseph, was deeply troubled in 
spirit. [The prophet gives him a ‘‘sign’’—the 
birth of a child—a sign which assures the king 
of the unending perpetuation of the throne of 
David, then in peril. So, the angel, speaking to 
‘Joseph, thou son of David,” assures him of an 
even greater deliverance through the child, ‘‘for 
he shall save his people from their sins.” Is not 
the writer of St. Matthew warranted in recall- 


ing the words of Isaiah? Are we justified in | / 


cheapening the words of the New Testament | 
just because we find it hard to believe in mir- 
acles? Has not the passage an infinitely richer 
meaning and fittingness than if it be thought of 
simply as a poor and inadequate suggestion of 
an otherwise unexplainable legend? Such criti- 
cism is wearying. How infinitely simpler it is 
just to accept the truth in faith. 

There are other theories which seek to ex- 
plain the tradition either by obscure Old Testa- - 
ment suggestions or by Jewish folklore. I will 
not tire the reader by giving any of them, for 
they are intricate, cumbersome, and utterly un- 
convincing. I do not think any of them has much 
critical support. 

Topsy says: “I spects I growed,” to explain 


80 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


her being. Is this, then, the explanation of the 
birth tradition, that it just “growed” ? How, or 
why a legend starts, it would often be hard to 
say. The critics give themselves unnecessary 
trouble in their world-wide search for the seed 
of Christian belief. The belief is there, dating 
from very early days. Why not simply say it 
grew? Well, apart from the fact that the soil in 
which the tradition started would not spontane- 
ously produce such a rare flower as we find in 
the story of the evangelists, we only have to 
glance at other ancient Christian writings than 
the New Testament to find out what legends 
were really like. For we have early Christian 
legends in plenty, and all we have to do is to 
heed Hamlet’s urging to ‘‘Look here upon this 
picture, and on this.” I will give a sample or 
two. 

From the Gospel of the Infancy: “When 
the Lord Jesus was seven years of age, he was 
with other boys his companions about the same 
age. Who, when they were at play, made clay 
into several shapes, namely, asses, oxen, birds, 
and other figures, each boasting of his work 
and endeavouring to exceed the rest. Then the 
Lord Jesus said to the boys, I will command 
these figures which I have made to walk. And 
immediately they moved, and when he com- 


What the Critics Say 81 


manded them to return, they returned. He had 
also made figures of birds and sparrows, which, 
when he commanded to fly, did fly, and when he 
commanded to stand still, did stand still; and 
if he gave them meat and drink, they did eat 
and drink.” 

And again. “And Joseph, wheresoever he 
went in the city, took the Lord Jesus with him 
where he was sent for to work to make gates, 
or milkpails, or sieves, or boxes; the Lord Je- 
sus was with him wheresoever he went. And as 
often as Joseph had anything in his work to 
make longer or shorter or wider or narrower, 
the Lord Jesus would stretch his hand toward 
it, and presently it became as Joseph would 
have it.” 

And again. “It was after sunset, when the 
old woman and Joseph with her reached the 
cave, and they both entered. And, behold, the 
whole cave was filled with lights, greater than 
the light of lamps and candles, yea, greater 
than the light of the sun. The babe was then 
wrapped in swaddling clothes, and sucking at 
the breasts of his mother, Mary. When they 
both saw this light, they were amazed. And the 
old woman asked blessed Mary and said, Art 
thou the mother of this child? And Mary an- 
swered and said, I am. Whereupon the old 


82 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


woman said, Thou art very different from all 
other women. And the blessed Mary answered 
and said, As there is not any child like to my 
child, so neither is there any mother like to his 
mother.” | 

It would be possible to go on with this painful 
sort of thing for a long time, quoting from the 
various books of what is called the Apocryphal 
New Testament. The point of the comparison 
with the true Gospel lies in the inevitable ex- 
cesses to which actual legend always tends. 

Sir William Ramsay says, in another connec- 
tion: “Oriental tradition (he is really referring © 
to legend) is so free in its creation, so unfet- 
tered by any thought of suitability in the acces- 
sories, that it is marked off from history by a 
deep, broad gap.” The Jews of the time of our 
Saviour were not without their folklore, but we 
are safe in saying that nothing from it has ever 
been brought forward which either in matter or 
style remotely suggests either the central idea, 
or the spiritual sincerity, reserve, and simplicity 
of the birth narratives of the Gospels. These 
are qualities which cannot be ignored. Even the 
art of a literary genius when portraying fiction 
rarely reaches the level which is so uncon- 
sciously set by those who spake the truth of old. 


Vi 
A SUBORDINATE TRUTH 


FROM THE RATHER bare outline of the case 
in behalf of the virgin birth which I have 
sketched up to this point, I think we may say 
we have a reasonably good historical basis for 
believing the tradition. We have two entirely 
independent, authentic documents, manifestly 
written without any deceptive motive—that is, 
in good faith—uninfluenced by Jewish or gentile 
suggestion, simple and reserved in style, each 
narrating identically the same thing, but in an 
utterly different setting from the other, and 
without a trace of collusion. Such documents 
constitute what would ordinarily be regarded 
as sound evidence of truth. Many events in the 
past which rest upon inferior evidence have 
been universally accepted as fact. 

When, however, we take into consideration 
the element of the supernatural, we must 
frankly admit that a good historical basis is not 
enough to insure general assent. In the view of 


84. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


the modern world in general the presumption 
is all against the truth of anything that is not 
strictly in accordance with natural law. We 
must, therefore, find out what the virgin birth 
means in the economy of divine wisdom; must 
be ready to give to him that asketh a reason of 
the hope that is in us. A stupendous miracle 
which is unrelated to great actualities is a mean- 
ingless thing, offensive to sober faith as well as 
to reason. So we must learn the meaning of the 
doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, and, 
above all, ask ourselves how the fact is related 
to the greatest truth of all—Hlis Divinity. 
There are wrong ways and there is a right 
way of approaching this matter. I believe it is 
a serious mistake to ignore the necessity for a 
reasonable interpretation of such a great mys- 
tery as the birth of a human child of a virgin 
mother, but to say that it must be accepted by 
all good Christians solely upon the authority of 
the Bible. I trust that I have said enough to 
make it plain that I, for one, do accept the evan- 
gelists’ narratives as literally true. I am old- 
fashioned enough to accept them in their en- 
tirety and not with reservations—not taking 
refuge, for example, in a theory of “poetical 
license’ when it comes to the shepherds’ vision 
of the angels. But, on the other hand, it is not 


A Subordinate Truth 85 


true to say that the sober sense of Christendom 
endorses the idea of the complete and literal in- 
fallibility of the Bible. Whatever individual 
teachers may have said on this matter at vari- 
ous times, or whatever stand some few church 
bodies may have taken, it certainly cannot be 
said that any claim for the literal accuracy of 
the whole Bible, or for the absolute authenticity 
of all its parts, has today, or ever has had, the 
united support of Christian thought and teach- 
ing as a whole. Martin Luther, for example, 
practically repudiated the whole epistle of St. 
James on account of its teaching. Very few, if 
any, scholars would admit that the last twelve 
verses of St. Mark are genuine. The second 
epistle of St. Peter is seriously questioned by 
high authority. [he trend of judgment as to the 
authenticity of the various books is far more 
conservative than it was a generation ago, and 
we need have no fear that the authority of 
scripture will be weakened in the years to come. 
I believe it will be just the other way. At the 
same time, a simple stand upon the complete ac- 
curacy of either the Old or New Testament is 
too unintelligent to endure the modern attacks 
of rationalism upon our faith. So we must have 
Biblical testimony, plus Biblical study, plus 
careful and reasonable interpretation, in order 


86 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


to establish the truth of the Christian tradition 
regarding the birth of our Lord. 

Again, I believe it is wrong to suppose that 
our belief in the Divinity of Christ takes its 
rise from the fact of His virgin birth. St. Paul 
was teaching the Divinity of Christ before the 
fact of the virgin birth was known excepting to 
a few. He was teaching that great doctrine in 
the most definite way, and Christians were ac- 
cepting it as fundamental truth, several years 
before the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke 
appeared. The opening words of St. John’s first 
epistle reveal the basis upon which rested the 
whole structure of faith. ‘“[That which was from 
the beginning, which we have heard, which we 
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked 
upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word 
of life... that... declare we unto you.” The 
overwhelming conviction in the hearts and 
minds of the first eyewitnesses of what Jesus of 
Nazareth was—a conviction which grew irre- 
sistibly out of their daily life with Him, when 
they saw with their own eyes His transcending 
power over both human souls and physical na- 
ture, when they heard truth told as it had never 
been told before, when they touched the awful 
cross-wounds and saw their Master living again 
after His death—this overwhelming conviction 


A Subordinate Truth 87 


of reality bore all else before it from the day of 
Pentecost. It has reached into the consciousness 
of unteld millions ever since, and, through the 
marvelous pages of the Gospel, is today our 
surest warrant for the faith by which we live. 
I believe and love the doctrine of the virgin 
birth of Christ. But I must bear witness to the 
fact that as a force in turning men to Christ in 
the earliest days, it did not exist, and, I say it 
reverently, it could not have been intended to 
become a factor in persuading the world at any 
time of the truth of Christ’s Godhead. 
No—we must place the virgin birth, as a 
valid tradition or as a true doctrine, in its 
proper and rightful setting—in its necessary re- 
lationship to the central thought of our religion. 
We must not make of it a fetish—we must not 
think of it simply as one of the inexplicable won- 
ders told in an infallibly true Bible—we must 
not base upon it either our faith in Christ or our 
love for Christ—we must not suppose that such 
a birth is more seemly than the birth of Christ’s 
brother men. To think in these ways is to put a 
wrong emphasis upon a belief which is subject 
to much misunderstanding and which is under 
the fire of rationalistic disdain at this very time, 
and so, to do injury to an element of Christian 
faith which is not only dear to millions of be- 


88 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


lievers but which also lies very close to the most 
important truth of all—the divine and eternal 
personality of Him who was born of Mary. 
And so we must strive to understand what the 
virgin birth really means, why it was a part of 
God’s purpose of redemption, why it was re- 
vealed in the Gospel, and why it must remain as 
an essential of the expression of Christian 
teaching everywhere and at all times. ‘To probe 
thus deeply into a mystery of divine life may 
seem to some rash and presumptuous; and yet 
the questions I have suggested have been at 
least partially answered many times with such 
reverence, such spiritual insight, and such fidel- 
ity to the facts as we have learned them, that 
we may understand better why the church has 
so jealously guarded the doctrine of the virgin 
birth as a sure and vital part of its whole 
message. 

It is so necessary that we should start right 
in our interpretation of the subject, that before 
we go on in another chapter to consider the 
special ways in which the virgin birth is related 
to our fundamental belief, I will ask the reader 
to follow me in a little venture of constructive 
imagination in order to bring before our minds 
more clearly certain human aspects of the nar- 


A Subordinate Truth 89 


ratives which bear upon the true position and 
interpretation of our doctrine. 

Let us go back again to St. Matthew’s nar- 
rative. Each time I read this I am more strongly 
impressed by two thoughts: first, that no one 
excepting St. Joseph could have revealed what 
we are told in this narrative; and, second, that 
the responsibility which was laid upon his faith 
and courage was truly awful. We can readily 
understand the wretched sinking of his heart 
when he learned of the condition of his be- 
trothed wife; we can commend the mercy 
which prompted that ‘‘just man” in a cruel age 
to spare a young woman so far as he could. But 
can we so easily rise to the full height of his 
faith in God which led him to trust absolutely 
the vision of truth which was sent him, and 
to take Mary to wife, and to share her shame, 
to shield her and tenderly protect her, and to 
look stedfastly forward with undismayed con- 
fidence in her goodness to the birth that was to 
come? What must he do? Keep silence, or try 
to make others understand? Clearly, silence 
was the part of wisdom and of goodness, too, 
though the burden he had to carry in his heart 
was heavier than it is given to many to bear. 
But let us ask ourselves this: when the little son 


90 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


was born, and as St. Joseph watched Him day 
by day growing in favour with God and man, 
can we suppose that he even dimly or remotely 
guessed any of the truth as we believe it today? 
I cannot suppose so for a moment. Such a 
fathoming of God’s unsearchable plan of re- 
demption for all mankind could not, we may 
feel sure, have come to that humble Jewish 
spirit; and we may reverently believe that St. 
Joseph closed his eyes in death without one 
shadow of a thought that that dear Son, who 
must so lovingly have served His earthly father, 
was none other than One with the Father of 
us all. | 

But before his days were ended St. Joseph 
would have felt that what he knew too well to 
doubt, the purity and integrity of Mary, must, 
for her sake and for her son’s sake, be made 
known to at least one or two who could be 
trusted. Whisperings and scandal there must al- 
ways have been, and that this scandal persisted 
long we may infer from St. John’s Gospel. And 
so the little record was begun. We know nothing 
as to who wrote the words which we have, 
though I confess to a feeling that it was St. 
Joseph himself, who, as head of the household 
would look upon it as a sacred duty to put his 
secret in written form. But, whether he wrote 


A Subordinate Truth QI 


the words, or trusted to some safe, tried friend, 
we have the facts from him; the message of the 
angel in a vision,,the goodness of Mary, the 
birth and naming of the baby, the coming of 
the far-dwelling magi, the dread of Herod’s 
malignity, the wearying exile, the coming home 
at last. Nothing else came from that faithful 
guardian—no faint foreshadowing of the truth 
which should one day set on fire human hearts 
and change the very aspect of all human life. 
If that little record contained one word as com- 
ing from those lips which had pressed on the 
soft child cheeks of Him whom St. Joseph 
took to his heart as his own son, to suggest 
that he dreamed who that son really was, it 
would brand itself as a spurious thing, unworthy 
of our belief. 

Then take St. Luke’s account. From the open- 
ing address to Theophilus, written in the Greek 
of a man of education and culture, we pass di- 
rectly into a narrative which has been well de- 
scribed as Greek only in the words which are 
used—for it is all Hebrew in thought and tone. 
It is plainly a woman’s story, a mother’s story; 
and that mother was of the race of Israel to the 
marrow of her bones. We need not suppose 
that she wrote the words herself; some close 
confidante there must have been whom she could 


92 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


trust with her most intimate thoughts. How, or 
when, or through whose mediation the exqui- 
sitely reserved little record, with its unmistak- 
able feminine touches, came into the hands of 
the beloved physician, we shall never know. 
Some have surmised that it was Joanna, the 
wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, who became 
the source of St. Luke’s knowledge of the 
earliest years. Be that as it may, the evangelist 
tells us simply that he had had perfect under- 
standing of all things from the very first, and 
that he wrote in order that Theophilus might 
know the certainty of those things which were 
believed. Let that be enough. He has shown 
well that he is trustworthy; and I think it is 
clear that he used no words of his own in hand- 
ing down the tradition excepting only what were 
needed to connect the parts into one well con- 
structed whole. 

We will not follow the story in detail, but 
will notice again what we found in the case of 
St. Joseph, that even she who had pondered all 
things and kept them in her heart, betrays no 
consciousness of who and what her God-sent 
child must be. Bishop Brooks, in a Christmas 
sermon, brings out in a fine passage the essen- 
tially human bond between St. Mary and the 
little Jesus. And it was simply that—a human 


A Subordinate Truth 93 


bond. It was a precious gift from God that she 
had had, marvelous in its sending. But, though 
she may well have looked wonderingly forward 
to greater things in her son’s life than had ever 
come to man before, yet we may be sure He was 
not divine to that heart from which He was 
nourished. How much more the virgin mother 
may have come to think in later years when the 
beloved John had taken her to his own home, 
when her son had risen from the awful death 
which she had seen, and at last had passed to 
His Father’s side, no one may say. But I would 
rather suppose that the benediction of God’s 
peace in death came to that handmaid of the 
Lord while she was yet unwitting of the truth, 
than to try to imagine that she ever knew or 
ever could have believed that God had chosen 
her to bear the human form of His eternal 
Son. 

And so, at last, near to the awful days when 
the holy city was laid in ruins by the legions of 
Titus, at a time when the young religion of our 
Saviour was pressing its way into human hearts 
far and wide throughout the great empire, 
those two stories of the birth of the Lord began 
to come to the ears of the churches. As the 
scrolls of papyrus came to the different centers, 
and the long, scrupulously careful labor of 


94. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


copying was begun, and the words were read to 
the disciples, and the elders preached the 
tidings, can we suppose that this newly pub- 
lished truth about the birth of Jesus Christ 
made Christians feel more assured that He, 
their Lord and Saviour, was indeed their God, 
the eternal Son of the Most High? I cannot be- 
lieve so. The undaunted Paul and many others 
had for years been declaring the great truth to 
all; and their message had met no obstacle in 
the hearts of those who had been prepared and 
instructed by the preaching of the Apostles, but 
rather became almost at once the very heart of 
all Christian thinking. Without that clear, in- 
spired message of the Godhead of the Saviour 
and the constant assurance of the resurrection, 
we could hardly comprehend the amazing 
growth of the religion of the Cross. Chris- 
tianity found its first great motive power in the 
conviction of the divinity of Him who had 
risen from the dead. But then, when this newly 
told truth about their Lord’s birth came quietly 
out of its old Palestine home, and slipped, as 
it were, gently into its place in the faith of the 
churches, those men and women of the early 
days could understand, and I believe did under- 
stand, that the wonderful birth of the Saviour 
was just one thing with all else which they had 


A Subordinate Truth 95 


learned about Him—that God gave His Son 
to men—that God sent Him into the world— 
and the story of Bethlehem became the last link 
in a great chain of truth which bound them all 
together in the Body of Christ. 

There is a strange potency in the doctrine. of 
the virgin birth, as the history of our religion 
shows, for there are few things in the Gospel 
which stir the imagination so much as it does 
with its human appeal. And it is a potency 
which can accomplish as much in these days of 
advanced learning as it did in the Dark Ages. 
But we must be careful to think of it as it really 
is—not one of the original foundations of our 
belief in Christ, but, when faithfully accepted, 
as a sure and strong safeguard in our thoughts 
about our Saviour’s person. And Christian 
theology sets forth the doctrine of the virgin 
birth, not as an isolated wonder to stun men’s 
minds, but as a part of the eternal purpose of 
God of sending His only-begotten Son into this 
world to live our life in human form and nature. 

When we think of the virgin birth in this 
way, there is much else with which it seems to 
be related; the transfiguration, the resurrection, 
the ascension, all being manifestations of that 
human body which was born not of the will of 
the flesh nor of the will of a man, but of God. 


96 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


Indeed, I do not feel that it is going too far to 
suppose that the body and blood of Christ 
which we receive in a sacramental way, go back 
for their meaning to the conception by the Holy 
Ghost. It seems simpler to think of the human 
spirit being touched and nourished by that 
which was existent by the will of God. How- 
ever these things may be, and I merely suggest 
them, I should like to bear witness to the fact 
that for me there is no aspect of our Saviour’s 
life on earth which better assures me than does 
His virgin birth of the closeness of God to men 
—of His immanence in creation. Nor can I find 
anything which speaks more clearly than it does 
concerning the unwithholding trust which God 
will place in men and women who will, like 
St. Joseph, do as they are bidden of the Lord, 
or, like St. Mary, say: “Behold the handmaid 
of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy 
word.” 


VII 


WHAT DOES THE 
VIRGIN BIRTH MEAN? 


WE MUST COME BACK in this chapter to the 
great pivotal thought of the Christian religion, 
the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and ask 
in what definite ways His virgin birth is con- 
nected with this thought? 

When we speak of the divinity of Christ, we 
do not mean simply that our Lord displayed 
divine or godlike qualities of mind and heart, 
that He resembled God in His sublime right- 
eousness of character, that He lived so close to 
God that His life might be said to represent 
the divine ideal in human form, that He was 
one with God, in His purposes and aims. Ideas 
like these about Christ are popularly current, 
but if we stop with them and say no more we 
have got nowhere at all. Such conceptions of 
the Jesus of the Gospels do not even begin to 
represent the sublime figure who comes to us 
out of the Gospel pages. No—when we speak 


98 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


of the divinity of Christ we mean that in His 
very person, in His inmost being, our Lord was 
and is God Himself—God the eternal Son, be- 
gotten of His Father before all worlds. If we 
' stop with the thought of Christ as essentially 
human only, however gifted with the Spirit of 
God, however raised above our level by the 
purity of His life and by His perfect under- 
standing of the will of God, then we have failed 
completely to comprehend and express that 
faith in Him which His whole life sought to 
evoke from those who knew Him on earth. If 
the early church had stopped with this, our re- 
ligion could hardly have survived two genera- 
tions. But the early church did not stop with 
this. With amazing swiftness of perception it 
laid hold on the fact that Jesus was not simply 
human in His person, but was God in the flesh. 
This great truth may be looked upon as the 
A B. C. of Christianity in the New Testament 
period. St. Paul and St. John stand out as 
enunciating the thought most emphatically— 
St. Paul, by his indefatigable zeal in carrying 
the message far and wide, and St. John, by his 
sublime expression of the truth. But these in- 
spired leaders were, after all, only developing 
the conviction which underlay all the testimony 
of the other eyewitnesses and ministers of the 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 99 


Word; and Christians everywhere in apostolic 
days received and accepted the message of 
Christ’s divinity with gladness and singleness 
of heart. 

Out of this truth of the divinity of Christ 
developed what has long been known as the 
Doctrine of the Incarnation. Briefly put, this 
doctrine comprises three essential ideas: first, 
that in Jesus Christ there was and is one only 
person, God the eternal Son; second, that the 
eternal nature of Christ is the divine nature of 
God; third, that in coming into our life, this 
eternal person of divine nature took unto 
Himself a second nature, man’s nature—body, 
mind, soul, will, affections, instincts—every- 
thing which pertains to the entire man. In this 
same human nature He rose again from death, 
and ascended into heaven, carrying into the 
presence of the eternal Father that perfect 
thing, man’s nature, pure and undefiled by sin. 

To not a few people in these days the care- 
ful language of theology comes with a kind of 
shock. It seems to them presumptuous to speak 
with such precision about matters which far 
transcend our comprehension—like a rushing 
in where angels fear to tread. And I will agree 
that it is regrettable to have to try to express 
the inexpressible—to put the mystery of God’s 


100 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


love into the cold and formal terms of eccle- 
siastical decisions. But experience teaches that 
it is necessary that this should be done. It is not 
as if the church fathers of the early centuries 
had decided to sit together and draw up a com- 
plete system of theological teaching. That was 
not the way of it. No—every decision of the old 
undivided church concerning the person of our 
Lord was forced upon the church by false teach- 
ing—the false teaching often of brilliant and 
influential men in the ministry, who preferred 
their own theories to the simple message of the 
New Testament. Sometimes those misleading 
teachers declared our Lord to be a created be- 
ing, higher than archangels, but less than God. 
Sometimes they went to the other extreme and 
identified Him with God the Father. Sometimes 
they denied that He was really man. Sometimes 
they taught that He was two persons, one hu- 
man, the other divine. Sometimes they seemed 
to think that He was just a human person of 
excelling righteousness upon whom God be- 
stowed His Spirit in plenitude. And so, in an- 
swer to all of these misconstructions of the Gos- 
pel, little by little the great fundamental doc- 
trine called the Incarnation was developed, as 
a guide to right thinking and a safeguard to 
right teaching about our Saviour. Need we add 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? tot 


that the wisdom and farsightedness of the an- 
cient church have been amply proved by the un- 
speakable blessings which this great doctrine 
has brought to Christian thought ever since, 
carrying with it, as it does, all the rich meaning 
contained in the promise of atonement and 
grace and hope for the life to come? 

Now, to go just a little bit farther in the- 
ology, there are three special truths which be- 
long to the Incarnation doctrine. These are, 
first, our Lord was sinless in His life; second, 
our Lord is the source of a new life for men; 
and, third, our Lord was and is eternal and di- 
vine in person. This last we have already stated 
as the principle element of apostolic teaching. 
Let us consider what connection in thought 
there may be between each of these truths and 
the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. 

1. Our Lord was sinless in His life. How 
does this truth bear upon the virgin birth? 

We speak of our Lord as sinless with good 
reason, for so He comes to us in the Gospel 
portraiture, so He is declared to be by His 
witnesses, and so He declares Himself to be. 
He is unique in human life in this respect, for no 
other great and holy one has claimed perfection 
of moral life. His record alone will bear the 
test of closest scrutiny and come through with- 


102 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


out accusation of error or sin. He alone could 
fearlessly stand before His adversaries and 
challenge them: “Which of you convicteth me 
of sin?” 

But, when we say that our Lord was sinless 
we fall far short of the truth. He was that, but 
He was more. Perfect freedom from moral 
taint is never found in human life, save in the 
very young; and yet innocence is not inconceiy- 
able. I believe it has been very closely ap- 
proached in thousands of lives. But with our 
Lord it was different. His moral life must not 
be thought of as simply a freedom from error 
and wrongdoing, but it must be thought of in 
the most positive terms. In the Gospel it is pre- 
sented to us as a flaming exhibition of militant 
righteousness uninterrruptedly active. It is an 
invincible power in itself—a creative power for 
good. Within Him were no self-contradictions, 
there was no need of regret, no awful yearning 
for an unattainable goal; but all was onward, 
unhindered progress. When St. Luke speaks of 
His growth in the favor of God (the words 
may have been a mother’s tribute), we are not 
to think of that growth as a development from 
moral imperfection toward something better 
and higher, but rather as the natural stages of 
progress in a human life which was always per- 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 103 


fect. “I am the light of the world; he that fol- 
loweth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall 
have the light of life.”” The opposition of Je- 
sus to the darkness of evil is like the glorious 
flood of sunlight over the new-born earth in the 
allegory of creation—something which has 
never been seen in the fulness of its strength and 
beauty in man or woman. Christ is sinless, but 
He is more. He is the power of righteousness in 
all who will use Him. “If any man thirst, let 
Him come to me and drink.” It is a quality 
which human parentage cannot possibly convey. 
Our stock is too weakened by countless genera- 
tions of evil to transmit this invincible moral 
power. 

We may, perhaps, understand our Lord’s 
righteousness more clearly if we consider Him 
as subject to our own many temptations of 
every kind. We are warranted in thinking of 
temptation coming to Him _incessantly— 
through sense, through emotion, through mind 
and heart. We must be ready to understand 
that there was in His complete human nature 
just that of which we ourselves are acutely con- 
scious, that is, every capacity for responding to 
the allure of evil pleasure and to the behest of 
selfish purpose, and also a consciousness of the 
awful need of hard resistance. Otherwise had 


104. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


His temptations not been actual. I remember 
hearing a devout and learned theologian say 
that he supposed no man ever was tempted to 
the degree that our Saviour was tempted. I be- 
lieve that this is true. “But yet without sin.”’ 
And we may well ask, Why? How could a ht- 
man life be lived without sin? And to find our 
answer, we must consider who He was and what 
was the origin of His human life which so mani- 
festly rose superior to the awful power of 
temptation. Our Lord’s true human nature, so 
susceptible to everything which brings pleasure 
to men, so responsive to emotion, so completely 
equipped with human instincts, so beset by hu- 
man needs, so intimate in its contacts with men, 
women, and children, was a fresh, new thing in 
an evil world. Born by the power of the creative 
Spirit of a virgin mother, that human nature 
was untrammelled by the awful weight of in- 
herited selfishness. In this our Lord was all by 
Himself on earth. We have no word to describe 
His moral grandeur, because that is something 
which man does not and cannot know or com- 
prehend. His temptations searched out every 
portion of His human form and nature. He 
went through the full moral struggle of hu- 
manity. He suffered all the agony, and was 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 105 


blessed with all the peace which are involved in 
a successful combat with evil. Like us, He 
wanted human fellowship in His strife: ‘‘Could 
ye not watch with me one hour?” Like us, He 
knew the need of self-discipline: “He fasted 
forty days and forty nights.” Like us, He came 
to God for strength and help: ‘‘O my father, if 
this cup may not pass away from me, except I 
drink it, thy will be done.” But, unlike us who 
are born of men, in His inmost being Jesus our 
Lord was always free to choose the highest 
good, the perfect way of God. 

Such militant holiness as our Saviour’s life 
displayed does not inhere in those who are born 
of men; of this we are acutely conscious. Our 
long inheritance is of another kind; the race of 
man does not transmit the power of righteous- 
ness. Of such an one who actually went through 
the moral ordeal of human life unscathed we 
shall find the truest explanation when we learn 
that His life came not from human weakness 
but from divine power. That such a conclusion 
is not irrational is suggested by this brief sen- 
tence from Bishop Gore’s Belief in God, giving 
the view of one of the foremost agnostic scien- 
tists of modern times: “I once drew from Hux- 
ley the admission that if he believed—what he 


106 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


did not—that Jesus was strictly sinless, he 
would suppose that that involved as well a 
physical as a moral miracle.” 

2. Then consider the fact that our Lord 
was and is today the source of a new life, or a 
new kind of life, for all the world. How does 
this truth bear upon the virgin birth? 

I suppose that there are few thoughts in 
Christianity which are so universally cherished 
as is this thought of Christ as the progenitor, 
so to speak, of a new spiritual race. ‘I am come 
that they might have life, and that they might 
have it more abundantly.” Even among those 
who go far in their repudiation of the orthodox 
conceptions of our Lord’s person, the thought 
of “the Christ within,” illuminating, vivifying, 
strengthening, has become almost the starting 
point of Christianity. Not only was His life on 
earth the ideal life, but He Himself zs the life 
of men. 

St. Paul seized upon this thought as enun- 
ciated by our Lord and made it familiar to all 
to whom he wrote. He developed the idea in a 
contrast which he drew between Adam, “the 
first man,” the type of the natural life of men, 
and Christ, ‘‘the second man,” or, as St. Paul 
also calls him, “the last Adam.’’ Thus in 
Adam all die; but in Christ shall all be made 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 107 


alive. The life which Adam lived was of the 
earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from 
heaven. And the new life which takes its rise 
from Him is deathless: ‘‘Death is swallowed up 
in victory.” In this thought we reach the very 
ultimate conception of Christ’s mission to the 
world. The entire race needed, and needs, a new 
start, a new spiritual beginning, a new source of 
vitality. There is something almost cosmic in the 
idea thus presented. Our Lord’s own most 
cherished name, the Son of Man, suggests His 
complete identification with human life—but 
not as one of many, rather, as the representa- 
tive and head of the race. He is the way, the 
truth, and the life—Himself. He proclaims the 
laws of the new life with infallible authority. “I 
say unto you,” is His sufficient reason; and it is 
enough, for no other authority is on a par with 
his simplest declaration. And the whole civilized 
world today recognizes His coming as the be- 
ginning of a new era, and dates its years from 
Him, each one as a “year of the Lord.” 

To say that such a founder of a new race, 
whose coming is universally thought of as in- 
stituting a new age and a new life for the human 
spirit, of which new life He himself is the 
source, to say that this founder should owe His 
life to that nature which He came to uplift, 


108 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


that that source should proceed from the lower 
level, seems almost like a contradiction in terms. 
But as St. Paul set forth the thought of 
Christ as the New Adam in his own masterly 
way, let us see if, in spite of his silence as to the 
virgin birth, he does not seem to make some 
difference between the birth of men in general 
and the birth of the founder of the new race. 
Sometimes it happens that the choice of a 
particular word becomes a matter of deep sig- 
nificance; and I would have the reader note an 
illustration of this fact in the language of St. 
Paul’s epistles. I do not think that the apostle’s 
choice of words in what I have in mind can be 
dismissed as of no importance. There are only 
a few passages in his writings in which he refers 
to the birth of Christ or to the birth of men in 
general, but in every case he uses one word to 
denote Christ’s birth and a different word to de- 
note normal birth. ‘To put it exactly, he uses the 
verb gignomai in connection with Christ, and 
gennao in connection with men. His use in this 
respect is invariable; he never confuses the two 
methods of speech. The first word, gignomai, 
which he applies to the birth of Christ, is fre- 
quently used in classic Greek to denote birth— 
but never in New Testament Greek, which was 
of a much later date. In other words, it is unique 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 109 


phraseology in the Bible. Only once in the rest 
of the New Testament is it found in the sense 
of ‘‘born,” and that is when St. John says, ‘“The 
Word was made flesh.’ And this, of course, is 
exactly the way in which St. Paul uses it. It 
would seem as if St. Paul in employing this un- 
usual mode of speech, was, whether consciously 
or unconsciously, making a distinction between 
the coming into the world of the Son of God 
and the birth of the sons of men—a distinction 
which would readily be explained by his knowl- 
edge of the virgin birth. I will list the passages 
referred to, translating gignomai into the 
English verb to “become,” for that is very close 
to its true meaning. 

Romans i. 3, “Jesus Christ our Lord, who 
became of the seed of David according to the 
flesh.” 

Galatians iv. 4, “God sent forth his Son, 
becoming of a woman, becoming under the 
law.” 

Philippians ii. 7, ““Who, being in the form of 
God ... became in the likeness of men.” 

1 Corinthians xv. 45, ‘““The last Adam be- 
came a quickening spirit.”’ (In this last instance 
the verb is carried over grammatically from the 
first part of the sentence. ) 

These passages all refer to the entrance into 


110 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


human life of the eternal Son of God, and they 
are the only passages in St. Paul’s writings 
which do refer to that birth. Even in the sig- 
nificant reference to the mother of our Lord he 
does not say “born,” but “became.”’ It is not as 
if St. Paul were unacquainted with the usual 
expression for birth, for in that same fourth 
chapter of Galatians he uses it of the two sons 
of Abraham three times. How St. Paul might 
have learned the tradition of the virgin birth 
before it was made public by St. Matthew and 
St. Luke, is not hard to imagine. St. Luke was 
constantly with him, and it is fair to suppose 
that the material which that evangelist used in 
his Gospel was being gathered over a series of 
years. [he two men were in the closest intimacy. 
In almost his last written words St. Paul says, 
“Only Luke is with me.” It is hardly conceiv- 
able that the writer of the Gospel would not 
speak of the tradition of the Saviour’s birth to 
the man whom he so revered. To me it seems 
perfectly manifest that St. Paul knew of the 
virgin birth and that his belief in the tradition 
lies behind his unusual choice of words. 

This little glance at word usage is probably 
interesting in itself to many of us, and suggests 
the way in which St. Paul might subconsciously 
have adapted his language to the thought of the 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 111 


virgin birth without having any occasion to 
refer to that event directly. But the real sig- 
nificance of the matter appears only when we 
connect his phraseology with the thought that 
Christ’s entrance into human life marks a new 
beginning in the affairs of men—a thought 
which St. Paul expresses very clearly. We might 
put the matter in this way: Could any father, 
looking on his little son, fail to know that that 
child is, after all, like himself and all his fore- 
fathers, “‘of the earth, earthy’—that all his 
life long he will be impeded and weakened by 
the imperfections of the stock whence he 
springs? In contrast to this, Christ, says St. 
Paul, is not of the earth, earthy, but is the Lord 
from heaven. Or again, can any father expect 
that the child whom he has begotten will ever 
be other than a “living soul’’—simply human, 
in all ways, on the same level with all of our 
race? In contrast with this, Christ, St. Paul de- 
clares, was not simply a living soul, but was 
made a quickening spirit—a source of life. Or 
again, can any father conceive of the child of 
his own blood as born to redeem his brother 
men from sin? In contrast with this, St. Paul 
tells us that God sent forth His Son, made of a 
woman, made under the law, to redeem them 
that were under the law. Or, once more, can 


112 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


any father imagine his own child as proceeding 
from a higher order than humanity in order to 
humble himself in death for the sake of his 
fellow men? In contrast with this, St. Paul tells 
us that Christ was in the form of God, but was 
made in the likeness of men, and became 
obedient unto death. 

If the source of a new life for us all is to be 
looked for on earth, then, surely, that human 
life in which the source resides must itself mark 
a new beginning. The entire constitution of man 
—body, mind, instincts, feelings—has been 
damaged by untold generations of selfishness. 
Our human nature needs a new creative act to 
endow it with the power which our Saviour had 
on earth. From the virgin mother He derived 
all that is essential to our life; but only by a 
divine act—the overshadowing power of the 
Holy Spirit—could that body and mind and 
heart which He received from her be quickened 
in perfection, restored to their primal and in- 
tended state, in the image of God. Man’s be- 
getting is incapable of such a result. 

I might be charged with reading more mean- 
ing into the words of St. Paul than is justifiable, 
though I cannot feel that [ misinterpret him. 
But even so, this fact remains: the “natural 
man’’ has been unspeakably impoverished and 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 113 


weakened by sin—TI mean, by the sin of all, by 
the awful, uninterrrupted course of selfishness 
throughout the history of our race. We simply 
cannot expect that in any human birth the 
malign results of man’s long inheritance of evil 
could be obliterated excepting by a special act 
of God—a miracle. Not in any way according 
to the course of nature could a child be born 
into this world who would be so free of the 
benumbing oppression of countless centuries of 
cruelty and wrong as to rise to a new level and 
offer his own life to all for spiritual strength 
and immortal, deathless vitality. Of all of this 
our consciousness amply assures us. We know it. 
It is the virgin birth of our Saviour, therefore, 
which makes it possible to think of His human 
nature as the new thing on earth—the new be- 
ginning, the new source, bestowed by God alone. 

3. The last of the special truths which we 
are considering is that our Lord Jesus Christ 
was and is the divine person, the only-begotten 
Son of God. How does this truth bear upon the 
virgin birth? 

Let us try to put the matter in this way: 
When any man becomes a father, what is he 
conscious of begetting? A human child, it will 
be said, one of his own kind or stock. He is in- 
capable of imagining or desiring as his offspring 


114. Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


a being of any other kind, higher or lower. And, 
of the child whom he begets we may say that 
he has from the moment of his birth, at least 
potentially, everything which is essential to hu- 
man personality. It is a human person that is 
born, distinct from all other persons, human, 
angelic, or divine. If we were to say that no 
human father is capable of begetting other than 
a human child, I venture to say that none would 
disagree. If we were to say that no human 
father is capable of begetting a divine person, 
we might possibly be charged with invading a 
field which belongs only to the omnipotence of 
God; and yet I am confident that we should 
have the practically unanimous endorsement of 
all human consciousness. Man is man, and God 
is God. We were fashioned after the divine 
likeness, but there can be no confusion between 
the Creator and the created. The will of the 
flesh, the will of man, does not aspire to the 
fathering of the human life of Him from whom 
all existence flows. 

And so when out of the days that had gone 
so silently there came forth at last from their 
old Palestinian home the two brief messages, 
the story of Joseph and the story of Mary, we 
are justified in supposing that Christians every- 
where, as the strange but lovely narratives 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 115 


reached their ears, realized the truth at once 
and took it gladly to their hearts: Man did not 
beget that divine person, their Lord and 
Saviour, but by the overshadowing power of the 
Holy Ghost a pure maiden body had enshrined 
Him in His incarnation. It was not a matter 
then to enter into the slowly developing the- 
ology of the church, to be treated of in apostolic 
letters. It was just the truth, simply told by 
those who knew, those who loved Him most. 

There are those who would say that the vir- 
gin birth of Christ violates the fundamental 
law of the reproduction of kind. I feel, how- 
ever, that it is perfectly fair to contend that in 
one true sense there was no reproduction of 
kind in the incarnation of the divine person of 
the Son. Human, He was, it is true; so com- 
pletely human that St. Paul could use the bold 
figure of a ‘‘self-emptying” to denote His hu- 
mility in the life He took. And the church has 
always guarded the reality of His humanity, as 
jealously as the perfection of His divinity: Yet, 
when we fix our minds upon who it was who 
came into our restricted life for our salvation, 
the eternal person, God the Son, we find Him 
marked off from ourselves in kind so definitely 
that there can be no confusion of thought. No 
human father could beget such a child, and only 


116 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


by the power of the Holy Spirit could a woman 
become the mother of God in the flesh. It is not 
a question of the “‘method”’ or ‘‘mode”’ by which 
God the Son came into the world; the virgin 
birth becomes simply an essential element in the 
answer to the question: Did God really become 
incarnate ?And it would thus appear not as a 
miracle greater than the virgin birth itself but 
as an utterly incomprehensible thing, were we to 
assert that a man had become the father on 
earth of the divine person, the Son of God. 

Such reasoning as this may appear to some as 
over-logical. I admit that we are dealing with a 
great mystery which should be approached only 
in the utmost faith and with humility of mind. 
What I here offer has been said, however, often 
before and in far better form. I offer it now 
not in a dogmatic spirit, but with the sincere 
desire of putting into simple expression a 
thought which may help some to realize the 
close and intimate connection between the fact 
of our Saviour’s virgin birth and that great 
truth upon which rest all our hope of salvation, 
our happiness and wellbeing of soul, the truth 
of the Incarnation of God the Son. 

The effect of a consideration of the three 
truths of which we have been thinking ought to 
be cumulative. Each by itself “proves” nothing 


What Does the Virgin Birth Mean? 117 


at all. All together “‘prove’’ nothing. When 
taken with other matters which we have touched 
on, the quality of the documents, the inability 
of critics to explain the story in natural ways, 
the congruity between the fact related by Jo- 
seph and Mary and the basic belief of Chris- 
tians throughout the history of our religion, 
then the thoughts which I have suggested ought 
to come as an aid to our faith. We do not at- 
tempt to prove the spiritual truths of religion. 
The existence of God cannot be established, but 
only made reasonable, by logical process. It is 
only faith which can grasp and hold firmly the 
evidence of things unseen. When, however, we 
are told that though the virgin birth of our 
Lord might conceivably be a fact but would 
have no essential connection with the incarna- 
tion, such truths as we have been considering 
tell us instantly that that cannot be. The con- 
nection is there, vital, manifest, and essential. 
Without it the virgin birth would mean nothing 
at all—the story would be but a fantastic tale, 
with no rightful place in Gospel or in creed. 


VIll 
CREED AND FAITH 


THERE ARE A FEW large church bodies which 
have no creed, but base their standard of belief 
upon the plain meaning of the New Testament. 
So far as the doctrine of the virgin birth is con- 
cerned, those bodies seem prevailingly to accept 
it as true, although such a latitude of interpre- 
tation of the Gospels is permitted as would ap- 
pear to leave the door open to a great variety 
of opinion. It would, however, be quite out of 
place for me to consider here the wisdom or 
unwisdom of the policy of such churches. The 
majority of the Christian bodies, representing 
probably the vast preponderance of believers in 
this country, use definite forms of doctrinal ex- 
pression for the official determination of what 
must and what must not be publicly taught as 
essential to the Christian religion. These forms 
are found in articles of religion, confessions, 
catechisms, and so forth; but as a brief, terse, 
and explicit expression of the real essentials, 


Creed and Faith 119 


nothing exists which can compare with the form 
universally known as the Apostles’ Creed. The 
somewhat older form known as the Nicene 
Creed is more precise in its declaration of our 
Lord’s divinity; but this creed, although incor- 
porated in the liturgies of the Roman Catholic, 
Greek, and Episcopal churches, has not the wide 
acceptance outside of those bodies which the 
Apostles’ Creed is given. This latter may be 
regarded as a symbol of faith officially recog- 
nized by the vast majority of Christians 
throughout the world. 

So far as our subject is concerned, the Apos- 
tles’ Creed would seem to be perfectly clear. 
‘T believe in... Jesus Christ, his only Son our 
Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, 
Born of the Virgin Mary.” This, then, is a 
statement of belief in the substantial accuracy 
of the old Christian tradition contained in St. 
Matthew and St. Luke, which is in constant use, 
publicly and officially, by many millions of peo- 
ple in this country at this very time. Can it be 
regarded as legitimate to use this form of 
words and at the same time deny the reality of 
the virgin birth? There are those who maintain 
that it is legitimate so to do. We cannot ques- 
tion their “‘honesty,”’ for their frankness in the 
matter is beyond question. They claim, and ex- 


120 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


ercise, the privilege of repeating the words of 
the creed which I have just quoted, in public 
services, while at the same time they assert that 
our Lord was the son of Joseph. They regard 
the words which declare the virgin birth as 
used in a metaphorical sense, giving them a 
symbolic interpretation of their own. I cannot 
explain that interpretation, for I have never 
been able to discover what it is. But the fact 
remains that the use of the Apostles’ Creed 
does not necessarily indicate a belief in the vir- 
gin birth on the part of some who say it. Those 
to whom this third article of the creed is an of- 
fence point out that there are other articles in 
the formula which must be taken in other than 
a literal sense. The whole modern world has 
moved on to a truer understanding of both 
natural and supernatural matters. Why should 
they be singled out and attacked on the score 
of unconformity, if not intellectual dishonesty, 
because, forsooth, they extend to the article on 
the virgin birth the same method of interpreta- 
tion as is admittedly applied to, say, the article 
on the descent into hell? 

Let us look into this matter and ask whether 
the practice of such people is legitimate. We are 
all free to believe as we believe. Formularies 
and church discipline cannot control private 


Creed and Faith 121 


opinion. But, are we as free, morally, to believe 
at variance with our expression of belief? 
There are twelve articles in the Apostles’ 
Creed. Omitting, for the moment, the article on 
the virgin birth, of the remaining eleven all but 
two speak of what we may call divine mysteries 
—truths, that is, which can be expressed only 
in the way in which human language, with all 
its limitations, will ever be able to express 
thoughts which transcend human understanding 
—and that is, by such words as best approxi- 
mate the truth. The standard illustration of 
this is in the words: “And sitteth on the right 
hand of God the Father Almighty.” Our Lord 
used just this phrase. The implication is, obvi- 
ously, the place of supreme honor in the uni- 
verse. A literal interpretation is impossible. The 
first article of all is also worded in this kind of 
approximate language, necessarily. Hardly any 
two people think exactly alike as to the creation 
of heaven and earth; nor is it in the least neces- 
sary that they should. The great truth to con- 
sider is, that by whatever method, or extending 
over whatever countless zons of that which we 
call time, the process of creation is the work of 
God. So, too, “the Holy Catholic Church, the 
Communion of Saints,” involves such thoughts 
of the spiritual union between Christ and His 


122 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


followers, such conceptions of human fellow- 
ship persisting after death, as to defy full ex- 
pression in human language. And it is to be 
noted that a certain degree of individual inter- 
pretation is inevitable in connection with what- 
ever assertion we may make of all matters 
which belong to the purely spiritual realm. With 
the obvious proviso, therefore, that private in- 
terpretation does not contradict the plain intent 
of any particular article, there is certainly room 
for men to think in various ways, quite honestly 
and inevitably, when they repeat the creed. 

The two articles which are to be excepted 
from the above considerations are: ‘‘He suf- 
fered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, 
and buried,” and, ‘“The third day he rose again 
from the dead.” In each of these statements, 
in addition to matters which we cannot compre- 
hend, there is another element which we may 
call the historic. These articles assert definite 
events in time. (The same thing is true of the 
words “He ascended into heaven.”’ But, as I do 
not want to digress, we may concede that the 
words ascended and heaven are both approxi- 
mate in their meaning. The element of time 
must be understood. ) 

In the first of these excepted articles we have 
nothing but bare historic fact. It asserts the 


Creed and Faith 123 


death of Christ. The name of Pontius Pilate 
definitely fixes with sufficient closeness the time 
in the history of the world when all took place. 
In the second excepted article, the elements of 
time and event are strongly marked by the 
words “Third day.” In whatever way we may 
picture to ourselves the nature of the risen body 
of Christ, we cannot fairly interpret such a 
statement, as some have done, as meaning a 
gradual consciousness coming to the disciples of 
a spiritual presence, a surviving influence, of the 
Master. It was a definite occurrence, involving 
an empty tomb and a visible presence, taking 
place on the third day after death. 

Now the question is, can the article on the 
virgin birth be removed from the category of 
events in time, the historic category, and find a 
place in the list of those assertions which deal 
with matters expressible only in approximate 
or symbolic language? Must it mean what it 
says, or may it mean something else? 

First, let us look at the matter from the point 
of view of the words. In the article in question 
we have the expression “Holy Ghost.” It brings 
tc our minds a very definite thought, an in- 
tensely sacred thought, the thought of un- 
fathomable divine personality working in the 
heart and soul of man, the Lord and Giver of 


124 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


life. But I would point out that this expression, 
the Holy Ghost, is the only one in the article 
which does not denote some concrete human 
idea. ‘‘Conceived” in connection with childbirth 
means only one thing. It is, to be sure, a word 
of mystery. No biologist can find the secret of 
the beginning of life in plant, animal, or man. 
But, in such a connection as we have here, “‘con- 
ceived” denotes a definite physical occurrence 
in time. It comes in immediate conjunction with 
the word ‘‘born,”’ the name of the child and the 
name of the mother. It is no more symbolic than 
the word “crucified.” The word ‘‘born,” of 
course, denotes nothing here excepting the 
physical event, the beginning of human exis- 
tence. It is a most intensely definite word. And 
lastly, the word “‘virgin.”’ Can anyone doubt the 
precise meaning of this word? There are in 
every language a few priceless words whose 
meaning is so exact as to be almost startling; 
and ‘‘virgin” is of this kind. Can we play fast 
and loose with such a word, smirching it with 
vagueness, robbing it of its age-old rights, 
twisting it and distorting it until it comes to 
mean just its opposite? We would not do this 
in our ordinary thoughts; why, then, when it is 
joined to a name made holy by long centuries 
of reverence, the name of Mary the mother of 


Creed and Faith 125 


our Lord? What I contend is that the article 
on the virgin birth of Christ not only has back 
of it the overwhelming force of the exact, un- 
equivocal understanding of all Christendom 
from the beginning, but also, in itself, by its 
very words, it expresses a thought which the 
whole world of today, believing and unbeliey- 
ing, can take in only one possible sense. “‘Sym- 
bolic interpretation” ceases to be legitimate 
when it leads to the assertion that Christ was 
born of Mary who was noé a virgin. 

Then again, look at the matter from the 
point of view of the churches. 

The churches which use the Apostles’ Creed 
—churches which, as I have said, represent the 
vast majority of Christians—have adopted a 
form of more than fifteen centuries in age to 
express their fundamental belief. They have 
thus become, each one within its jurisdiction, 
trustees of the basic doctrine of antiquity—the 
Incarnation. Earlier creeds there were than the 
Apostles’; such as the Old Latin, with its asser- 
tion, Qui natus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria 
Virgine (Who was born of the Holy Ghost 
from the Virgin Mary); or the creed of 
Irenzus, which declared, ‘“The Church believes 
... the birth from a virgin.” But even if no such 
authority and antiquity could be shown, as 


126 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


readily can be shown, for the substance if not 
for the form of the Apostles’ Creed, that would 
in no way affect its place in any church which has 
adopted it as its own standard of faith. It be- 
comes for any such body the official expression 
of its most fundamental convictions. Its sim- 
plicity, terseness, and brevity give it an as- 
cendancy in men’s minds over all longer and 
more complicated forms. Within the limits of 
its few brief statements there is ample room for 
liberty of thought and reverent speculation; nor 
can the ascertainment of great principles at 
work in the natural world affect in any slightest 
way the truths which it sets forth, so that the 
advance of science can proceed to its farthest 
limits without changing one jot or tittle of its 
wording. We are sometimes told that those who 
bind themselves to a literal understanding of 
ancient creeds which come out of days which 
knew nothing of modern science must of neces- 
sity close their eyes to ‘‘new truths.” But no new 
truth affects the things of God. The early 
church knew just as well as we do that no such 
thing as a virgin birth occurs in the experience 
of men. All of the marvelous achievements of 
research which open to us interminable vistas 
of the past do not make a divine miracle any 
less credible or any less possible than the 


Creed and Faith 127 


miracle was in the days of St. Matthew and St. 
Luke. 

The Apostles’ Creed, then, is almost the 
most precious possession of the churches, for 
it stands for permanency of faith in God. 
Through it the churches speak to men of things 
which always have been of chiefest worth in 
human life, which today have greater influence 
in the world than any power of which we can 
think, of things which in the years and cen- 
turies to come alone can lead men out of the 
darkness of error and endless strife into the 
kingdom of God. Can the churches forsake the 
faith of our fathers and survive? Can they com- 
pound an afhrmation and a denial of one and 
the same thing, bestride the dividing wall of 
faith and unfaith, giving an uncertain answer 
to the question, “‘Was the Son of God really 
born of a virgin?’’ Can they take such an atti- 
tude and retain the respect of an unbelieving 
world? We may be sure that whatever of con- 
fidence the churches may have forfeited in re- 
cent years is not the result of their inability to 
deliver the Gospel of Jesus Christ in modern 
terms of science and philosophy, but rather 
comes from the mistaken attempts of some of 
their teachers to take out of that Gospel every- 
thing which cannot be fathomed by the human 


128 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


mind. The great Christian bodies of America 
can command the attention of the most serious 
thinkers of our day, as well as the allegiance 
of their members, only by remaining what they 
were formed to be, guardians of the gates of 


faith. 


One of the greatest of living critics, in com- 
menting upon what he conceived to be St. Paul’s 
total ignorance of the Christ birth tradition, re- 
marks that that Apostle “had much greater 
things to say concerning the Lord.” And I sup- 
pose that there are not a few who, like this 
venerable scholar, feel that the whole subject 
which I have treated in this little book is unim- 
portant and trifling. The trouble is, however, 
that, unimportant though it may seem to many, 
it will not down. The history of Christian 
thought plainly shows that not only is there a 
clear, logical connection between the virgin birth 
and the incarnation, but the two things are so 
intimately joined together in the teachings of 
every school of church doctrine that if the latter 
is to be retained the former cannot be ignored. 
I mean, broadly speaking, that those who deny 
the virgin birth always end by so paring away 
the meaning of our Lord’s divinity that He be- 


Creed and Faith 129 


comes at their hands only a man like us all. The 
theory of adoptionism, as it is called, is brought 
in to explain His moral greatness. Upon Jesus 
of Nazareth, the son of Joseph, God bestowed 
the fullest measure of wisdom and beauty of 
character; and Jesus responded inwardly to the 
divine spirit in His heart with such fullness of 
love and such understanding of God’s will, that 
He was, so to speak, ‘‘adopted”’ as God’s repre- 
sentative and interpreter before men. Of course, 
in such a reconstruction of Christianity much 
else beside the virgin birth ultimately disap- 
pears. There is no place in it for the atoning 
sacrifice of Christ, or for the resurrection of 
His body from the tomb. I cannot see where 
there is room in such a system for prayer to 
Christ or for any worship of His person. But 
human beings are variously constituted, and 
matters which would appear unthinkable to 
some are perfectly consistent and defensible to 
others. And so we shall find that modern adop- 
tionists often retain much of the old vesture of 
religion—prayers and hymns addressed to 
Christ, sacraments, and even ancient creeds. 
Such, then, is the result in experience of an 
abandonment of the teaching of our Saviour’s 
birth. Let men call the old narratives “fairy 
tales”; still, they have a potency of their own, 


130 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


for the truth which they reveal has proved a 
sure safeguard to the greatest truth of all— 
that God Himself in person came down into 
our life in His infinite love and pity. Just as 
those who deny the virgin birth end by disbeliey- 
ing this great truth, so those who accept in faith 
the virgin birth are confident of the Godhead of 
our Saviour. 

The churches cannot ignore such a situation. 
They must not only stand four-square for the 
truth of the virgin birth, but also they must 
guard the assertion of the fact in their profes- 
sion of belief, for it will always prove to be a 
strong buttress to what comes first of all, their 
faith in the divine person of our Lord. 

Those of the laity who find it difficult to be- 
lieve that a maiden could bear a child other- 
wise than as God’s plan has appointed for the 
human race, should fix their minds resolutely, 
not on the miracle, but on the eternal person 
who came down from heaven to live and die 
among His brothers and to become the Saviour 
of us all. On that eternal person the hope of all 
the ends of the world is fixed. If He were no 
more than one of ourselves, He could not save, 
however righteous and noble in His living. If 
He were no more than one of ourselves, He 
could not be the source of a better life for us, 


Creed and Faith 1 


however strong and wise. We look not to man, 
but to God Himself to lead us out of the misery 
of sin and strife. If the virgin birth seems to us 
unbelievable—and why should it not?—we 
should ask first, is it believable that God in the 
person of the eternal Son came to us and took 
all our nature and lived our life? That is the 
great question for these modern days and for 
all time. And faith alone can answer it. I have 
no fear at all that those who find in this thought 
the dearest and truest expression of the love of 
God for men, will also find in the story of the 
virgin birth the secret of the beginning of the 
life of God in the form and nature of man. 
There is a vast difference between doubt or 
uncertainty on the one hand, and disbelief or 
flat denial on the other hand. The full Chris- 
tian belief is of such a marvelous sort as con- 
stantly to suggest queries, often doubts. The 
most convinced believers often have arrived at 
assuredness by traveling through dark days of 
unbelief—and not seldom do doubts come back. 
The strongest faith is one that has been tested 
out in the furnace of unanswerable question- 
ings, until it has learned to say, with Augustine 
of old, ‘““Thou hast made me for Thyself, and 
my heart will be at unrest until it find rest in 
Thee.” Simply because, in the very nature of 


132 Was Christ Really Born of a Virgin? 


things, an apprehension of what belongs to the 
divine life of God must be almost beyond our 
reach, we should not quench our faith by cold 
showers of reason, or deny ourselves the cheer- 
ing hope, the strength of heart, or the inde- 
scribable peace, which, in their fulness, come 
only from a real trust in the person of Him who 
was born of the Virgin Mary, our Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ. 


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